Balancing <i>Reality, Meaning,</i> and <i>Play:</i> The case of a digital game about the Swiss food system. A reflection on <i>Foodscape</i>’s design journey and its lessons for future serious games

Serious games are attractive educational tools for introducing students, and a broader audience, to complex sustainability challenges. How to design a serious game that continues to be used in practice is a common question. Here, we share the lessons we learned during the interdisciplinary design process.How to design an educational, serious game on sustainable development that continues to be used after its release? In this article, we reflect on the design of such a serious game, namely Foodscape . We used the Triadic Game Design framework to structure our reflections. We formulate key lessons for the future design of serious games with subject-matter experts, game designers, and education experts. We emphasize the importance of team members being willing to compromise in situations where they have conflicting views, and of building a mutual understanding of the game’s purpose and each participant’s roles in the design process. Finally, placing the user at the center of the development contributes to the promotion of the game. Future teams designing a serious game might benefit from the awareness of the trilemma that can occur in the design process.