Understanding Stakeholder Perspectives: Towards the Design of a Serious Game for Positive Energy Districts

This study examines how serious games might support the adoption of Positive Energy Districts (PEDs), urban areas that produce more energy than they consume, by addressing the shortage of data, tools, and guidance that local administrators face when implementing them. Framed within the PROPEL project and the EU's SET-Plan goals for PEDs, the research aims to identify the drivers and barriers stakeholders perceive toward game-based learning in this domain and to derive design principles for a future serious game.

The methodology combines two qualitative strands. Six in-depth interviews were conducted with local administrators and experts in Italy, Sweden, and Turkey, yielding 38 statements framed as drivers and 20 as barriers. Stakeholders valued serious games for improving attitudes toward learning, encouraging positive behaviours, and making education more enjoyable than conventional approaches. Their principal reservations concerned skepticism about the role of game elements in serious contexts and privacy considerations related to the data involved.

A comparative analysis of ten existing serious games, including titles such as Energy Cat, Smartainability, SimCity BuildIt, PowerHouse, and Clim' City, complements these interviews. Role-playing and unlimited replayability emerged as the most prevalent features, each appearing in nine of the ten games. Taken together, the findings point to a clear design direction: a simulation-based engine built on real data, organized in a modular structure that reflects the systemic complexity of PEDs, and accessible across multiple devices.