This weeks post is a sneak preview of some words that I will be saying at this week’s Fireside Chat on Serious Games in Transport. You can still sign up, and hear from myself, Glenn Lyons, Rebecca Posner, Maha Attia, Charles Musselwhite, and Clare Sheffield.

Why don’t transport planners play games? The question sounds like we are boring robots who are 100% serious all of the time. The thing is, we do play. We all play. Whether it is playing football on a Sunday morning or doodling on your notepad whilst listening to another webinar, we all play.

I would ask the question differently. Why don’t we play games in a way that makes our work better? As someone who has created two games for transport planners, I have often thought of this. Then, this tweet summed things up perfectly, in words I have sought for years.

We don’t play games because we do serious things. Infrastructure is serious. Road safety is serious. The economy and climate change are serious. Games are not serious, and if they are not serious then we should not think of them. But anyone who has studied people – and as someone married to someone who works in education, I benefit from their knowledge greatly – knows how important fun is. And how it is more important than having a good time.

To start with, fun is about learning. Great games give us new skills or a new insight into an issue. The game which I created, the Future Mobility Scenario Game, focusses heavily on learning. It works by putting people in the shoes of another person – from the CEO of a tech company to a School Crossing Patroller – and getting them to play different scenarios. People explore our world and our future in a different way, from a different perspective, and think about how different people will react to our own actions.

We think that learning about future worlds is a description of a scenario or a modelling report. But we learn through experience, and in the feedback on the scenario game that has featured heavily. People have the chance to experience the future, and to learn from it, and to think about how the actions of transport planners can affect it.

Fun is also about growing. We see this most often in children, who learn everything through play. For me, growing is not about experiencing the game or learning how it works, but through understanding its value as you develop your transport strategy or policy. We have all experienced a bad ice-breaker task or team game at work, and so we understand how a bad game can make everything worse. But a good game can make things a lot better.

In my experience with scenarios, games are particularly useful at two phases. First, is when you are collecting evidence from people. Second, is after you have created the scenarios and you want to explore them. I’ve already touched on the latter, but for the former I particularly recommend Evidence Safari’s. It’s a simple concept: spread 50, 100, 200, even 500 bits of evidence around a room, ask a question, and get people to hunt for the evidence and come up with new policy ideas and insight based on it. Instant fun, discussion, and from it new learning comes, and we grow as a result of it.

Finally, fun is about creativity. We like our reports, reams of data, and technical drawings. It builds on our strong analytical skills. But sometimes, a creative spark is needed. All that it needs is some simple tools, some basic rules, and a general direction, and people can be amazingly creative. And to tackle issues like the climate crisis, we need to be creative.

Take the most creative game I know: Lego. I have lost count of the number of times that this has been used to recreate streets in a people-focussed way, and winning hearts and minds by getting people involved in the process. Rather than have people shout through traditional means of consultation, lets take their creativity to make something better.

My time is almost up, so I wanted to conclude by saying this. There are loads of games out there, we need games to face the challenges ahead of us, and they can play a valuable role in the work that we do. This is about learning something new, growing as a profession, and using our creativity to create a better world. And why not have fun while doing it?