Democratic innovations as serious games

This paper discusses the opportunities and challenges of applying existing theoretical ideas and insights from serious games, playfulness, and gamification to the study of democratic innovation. The paper presents a new framework of analysis to better distinguish between the growing typology of democratic innovations by introducing the category of democratic serious games. This category enables a more in-depth exploration of processes that aim to promote participatory and deliberative democratic reform, but are not institutionalised and remain as pilots and simulations that primarily have pedagogic and indirect effects. The paper also sheds light on the consequences of existing elements in democratic practice that have gameful aspects. Specifically, the paper aims to research the extent to which the gamification of citizen engagement affects the epistemology of democratic processes. While gamification can be an effective strategy to promote the inclusion of traditionally difficult-to-engage and retain strata of the population, the introduction of game-based interactions risks significantly affecting key characteristics of democratic processes by promoting excessive competition and introducing behavioural incentives that might undermine capacity building and reflexive behaviour.