Gaming the Future of Infrastructure Planning: Playing the Serious Game InfraLife

Transport infrastructures are vital in shaping and structuring future human development. However, a peak of ageing infrastructure networks (e.g., road, rail, seaport) increasingly threatens to severely disrupt society. Infrastructure failure may cascade between networks due to increasing interdependencies between networks. Infrastructure administrations are puzzled by how they must address their ageing assets, while they must simultaneously accommodate new demand.

In order to disseminate results of the first authors’ PhD dissertation (Neef, 2025), and to further study the decision-making processes for infrastructure renewal, the authors of this abstract designed a serious game that immersively engages players in addressing their ageing infrastructures. As a player, you are the manager of a transport infrastructure network, and it is your challenge to keep that network functioning. The players must monitor the ageing, performance, finances, satisfaction, and potential expansion of their networks. To make it even more complicated, players will also face developments in the surrounding networks. Networks are increasingly interconnected, and developments in the rail network, for example, affect the highway network and vice versa. How will players keep their networks alive?

The serious game is an analogue board game, where three infrastructure administrations are ideally represented by six players. The game lasts for 3 hours, including a 25-minute explanation, a 25-minute debrief, a 25-minute collective first round, and up to eight subsequent rounds that each require a decreasing amount of time. The game is ideal for researchers and practitioners in the field of infrastructure and spatial planning, but it can be played by laypersons. The required space is ideally a large table (2m x 1.5m), so that the players can sit or stand around it, and the researcher can observe and make notes (cf. Figure 1). Due to the extensive nature of the game, we request a 180-minute time slot.

The design of the game employed an intrinsically integrated approach, aligning the goal-of-the-game, goal-in-the-game, game mechanics, and pedagogy (Van der Linden et al., 2024). The goal-of-the-game is for players to learn how the institutions of the planning of infrastructure renewal influence the network’s development; the goal-in-the-game is for players, as infrastructure administrators, to achieve network satisfaction by managing the performance of their assets given varying financial situations, and demands for maintenance and potential expansion of their networks. While many game mechanics exist, key game mechanics include independent decision-making on what infrastructure assets to invest in, the division of a central game board of all networks and individual game boards of individual networks, and a limited amount of project managers and finances that can be deployed each round to make asset investment plans for assets that age as rounds progress. The pedagogy includes anticipatory decision-making in complex decision-making situations; to prevent spoilers, this will be discussed more elaborately during the debrief.

For this workshop, the activity comprises playing the game, hence involving workshop participants as players. Moreover, we envision that the design of the game can also be discussed and positioned in recent developments in applied and serious gaming literature, in addition to the debrief regarding the content of the game.

The authors cordially invite participants to play the game, and learn about its content and design!