Taking Playful Scholarship Seriously: Discursive Game Design as a Means of Tackling Intractable Controversies

This study argues that playful scholarship can be operationalized through "discursive game design" as a method for addressing intractable policy controversies, using the controlled legalization of MDMA and other drugs in the Netherlands as its central case. Drawing on Norton Long's concept of an "ecology of games," the authors frame policy domains as interlocking arenas in which stakeholders pursue competing agendas. Their central thesis is that co-designing game prototypes with the people who inhabit these arenas can surface conflicting frames and open space for perspective change where conventional research framings have stalled.

The empirical grounding consists of a six-month transdisciplinary co-design project involving academics, NGO workers, journalists, police officers, health workers, and the Poppi drugs museum. Participants used board games, role-playing characters, and found-object "toys" such as dried pasta and glasses as boundary objects. Two prototypes were developed, one built from scratch and one adapted from the CIA-released card game Collection Deck, and were playtested in four sessions between 2018 and 2019 before moving online to Tabletop Simulator during COVID-19 restrictions. The authors report that friction between simplified game models and expert experience, along with humor and self-modifying rules, helped sustain collaboration and surface new understandings of stakeholder interrelationships and resource competition.

The authors are explicit that these findings are anecdotal and qualitative, drawn from a small number of sessions rather than systematic ethnographic data or measured outcomes. Challenges identified include drift toward routine play, academic skepticism, and the difficulty of evaluating impact. The work also cautions that gamified "serious" scholarship can adopt the rhetoric of play without its spirit, a risk the co-creation approach is designed to mitigate. Extending the argument, the authors propose that adopting a game designer's rather than a player's perspective may help break entrenched controversies such as climate change, urban decline, and the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, while acknowledging an ongoing tension between playful research processes and the peer-reviewed outputs that academic evaluation rewards.