This thesis investigates how serious games can be designed and used to improve decision-making for stormwater management in urban areas, which are increasingly vulnerable to intense rainfall due to high surface sealing, urbanization, and climate change. The challenges include limited public awareness of household measures to store and infiltrate stormwater, fragmented decision-making across public and private actors, and lack of collaborative planning platforms. Serious games—used to foster learning and cooperation—offer a promising but underexplored approach to address these barriers. The thesis makes four key contributions: (1) a review of existing serious games in urban water management, identifying gaps in current approaches; (2) a systems analysis methodology to identify relevant actors, elicit their perceptions, and develop a systems map that can be used as a foundation for game design; (3) the design and testing of SUDSbury, a board game to raise awareness among urban residents; and (4) the design and testing of Urban dRain, a case-specific game to support multi-actor collaboration for neighborhood-scale stormwater planning.

As cities expand and land becomes built over, more rainwater will run off rather than infiltrate or evapo(trans)pirate, increasing the likelihood of urban pluvial flooding. Stormwater management and planning is essential to ensure that urban areas are well adapted to climate change, involving cooperation between diverse actors with their own objectives. Current tools to support decision-making have a narrow technical focus and do not incorporate the multi-actor context. In this paper, we present a serious game called Urban dRain, developed with the aim to integrate technical assessment of blue, green and grey solutions and actor negotiation. In the game, participants are challenged to develop a stormwater management strategy for a Dutch neighbourhood in multiple rounds, first within their own separate groups, and then collectively. We present results from validation and play-testing the final game prototype with 70 students and researchers. Results show that the game supports socio-technical learning by encouraging players to come up with a range of stormwater management plans and negotiate for their individual goals while achieving a collective goal. The game demonstrates potential to bring actors with varying perspectives together and co-develop solutions to pluvial flooding, overcoming limitations of existing technology-focused tools.

There is an urgent need for urban environments to be flood resilient due to increasing urbanization and climate change. This can be addressed by adopting sustainable drainage solutions (SuDS) in households. However, lack of knowledge and awareness among urban residents is a barrier. In this paper, we present an educational serious game called SuDSbury to overcome this barrier and a pre-/post-game survey-based evaluation to study whether the game can educate citizens (and to what degree). An exploratory study with 14 players across three game sessions suggests that playing SuDSbury induced changes in knowledge, comprehension, and personal norms regarding SuDS. However, comprehension of concepts related to urban drainage can be improved by increasing game realism. The game should be further tested with a larger sample and a diverse demographic of urban residents. The participants further found that SuDSbury is fun and engaging to play, making it suitable for broader public interventions.

Urban water management (UWM) is a complex problem characterized by multiple alternatives, conflicting objectives, and multiple uncertainties about key drivers like climate change, population growth, and increasing urbanization. Serious games are becoming a popular means to support decision-makers who are responsible for the planning and management of urban water systems. This is evident in the increasing number of articles about serious games in recent years. However, the effectiveness of these games in improving decision-making and the quality of their design and evaluation approaches remains unclear. To understand this better, in this paper, we identified 41 serious games covering the urban water cycle. Of these games, 15 were shortlisted for a detailed review. By using common rational decision-making and game design phases from literature, we evaluated and mapped how the shortlisted games contribute to these phases. Our research shows that current serious game applications have multiple limitations: lack of focus on executing the initial phases of decision-making, limited use of storytelling and adaptive game elements, use of low-quality evaluation design and explicit indicators to measure game outcomes, and lastly, lack of attention to cognitive processes of players playing the game. Addressing these limitations is critical for advancing purposeful game design supporting UWM.