GAMEMANCIPATION NOW! An intergenerational framework for evaluating games as participatory tools in architecture and urban planning

Abstract

Games are increasingly used in architecture and urban planning to support participation, learning, and co-design, yet evaluation remains uneven: studies often report engagement and dialogue while less consistently assessing power relations, agency, and whether game outputs translate into influence in planning and design decisions – especially in intergenerational settings that include children. This paper addresses that gap by proposing the GamEmancipation Framework, a built-environment–specific evaluation tool for analogue and digital participatory games (including geogames) that treats adults and children as co-actors. Grounded in a systematic content analysis of literature spanning participation studies, children’s rights and participation, education, psychology, and planning/game scholarship, the framework operationalises evaluation through four sections: Foundations (structural and methodological conditions), Processes of Participation (phase-by-phase distribution of influence), Outcomes (developmental and transformative capacities, including spatial literacy), and Future & Sustainability (feedback, continuity, and governance coupling). Child-sensitive checkpoints are integrated within the same analytical structure rather than handled as an add-on, and built-environment add-ons foreground spatial relevance and cross-sectoral continuity. We demonstrate application through an illustrative case study of SPECTOR – The Sustainability Inspector, an analogue participatory post-occupancy evaluation game played in three school contexts (the UK, Serbia, and Spain) with 74 children (11–15) and architecture-student facilitators. Using deductive coding of archived interviews, observation accounts, and pupil-produced photographs, we assess the strength and consistency of evidence for each framework category. The application shows strong support for flexible participation, cooperative intergenerational dynamics during play, and spatially grounded evidence-making, while revealing constraints in agenda-setting and weak, context-dependent pathways for feedback, continuity, and institutional uptake. The findings underline that emancipatory trajectories depend not only on in-game participation but also on governance coupling and institutional commitment – an issue that is particularly salient for geogames, where spatial representations can be mistaken for influence without explicit decision pathways. The GamEmancipation Framework provides a transparent, criterion-by-criterion approach for evaluating and comparing participatory games in built-environment contexts, supporting more accountable claims about participation, transformation, and emancipation.