Serious Game Design For Playful Exploratory Urban Simulation

The year 2020 has stricken humanities with the ferocious COVID-19. During this period, regulation and restriction are active to mitigate the spread while simultaneously causing massive behavioral change globally. While the post-pandemic situation has created new habits, rules, and limitations to restrict traveling, it also offers opportunities to introduce the citizens an interactive technology solution to explore their urban space and neighborhood effortlessly and risk-free. This paper proposes the use of Minecraft, a sandbox game, and its gameplay to design an interactive serious game-based platform for collaborative urban exploration in a playful, immersive approach. The prototype within this paper applies the digital twin concept and its principles for the realistic re-creation of a virtual Dihua Street of Dadaocheng, an old town and a tourist hotspot in Taipei, Taiwan. In a serious-game environment that is both a playground and a working platform, users can cooperate with others, create dynamic user-generated content. As they explore while sharing their knowledge and experience in the virtual open space, users are also engaged in serious urban planning tasks. This paper’s main objective is to present the preliminary data of top priority users’ satisfaction with game elements or features to develop a serious game-based urban exploration platform while demonstrating the proof-of-concept of the urban digital twin. © Copyright owned by the author(s) under the terms of the Creative Commons