Playful Participatory Mapping: Co-creating Games to Foster Systems Thinking

The paper introduces YOUTHOPIAS, an evolving hybrid methodology for research, teaching, and community engagement that applies game design principles, particularly Donella Meadows's leverage points, to help communities develop systems thinking through playful participatory mapping. Its central argument is that co-creating games scaffolds a progression from culturally grounded community maps toward more abstract systems models capable of identifying practical points for intervention. The authors position this grassroots approach as an alternative to competitive, market-driven framings of higher education, while noting that systems thinking remains under-examined in both educational research and the game-based learning literature.

The evidence base draws on pilot workshops conducted over eighteen months across the United Kingdom, Malaysia, and Brazil, spanning diverse community contexts. The workshops revealed that participants were often reluctant to begin open-ended mapping, which consumed limited session time and required substantial facilitator scaffolding. In response, the authors plan to introduce pre-made building blocks in future iterations to ease this transition. A key finding concerns the stakeholder phase, which used influence and support mapping alongside turn-based role-play. This phase surfaced emergent and often surprising side effects, such as perverse academic incentives and gentrification driven by student housing, which the authors present as evidence that emergence is central to genuine systems understanding.

The work's scope is therefore cross-national and oriented toward participatory and community-based education rather than individual classroom learning, with attention to both urban and rural settings. The authors' conclusions emphasize that the value of co-created games lies less in producing a finished model than in the process through which participants recognize interconnection, unintended consequences, and the places where intervention can matter. The paper's reference base reflects this interdisciplinary reach, drawing on systems thinking, game-based learning, participatory design, and Indigenous and rural education scholarship.