Game room
Basic information
Project Title
Full project title
Category
Project Description
The #GameRoom is made of four walls, with tables, chairs and shelves.
At first it may seem like a normal verse, but setting foot inside its mute appearance. In a few moments it becomes a castle, where heroes to defeat a dragon or pirate galleon that sets sail for new adventures.
Some say they have become a magician and some a mythological creature.
The secret behind the magic of this verse?
The fantasy and the game they manage to unite and carry.
Project Region
EU Programme or fund
Which funds
Other Funds
European Structural and Investment Funds - PON METRO - Specific Objective 3.3.1
Description of the project
Summary
The #GameRoom is a design and crafting workshop of urban, role-playing and board games, on the first floor of a previous regenerated middle school now in a youth center, in a disadvantaged neighborhood of the city.
The project is born from an ethnographic research of 2017, carried out by the practice community of the Youthworker of the city of Bari linked by the methodology of role-playing and board games, and the need of the neighborhood’s young people to share a space where they can carry out activities that animate the territory, involve youth and young adults and make participation inclusive.
The renovation and furnishing works were masterfully followed by an architect specialized in an urban laboratory and participated in projects carried out by young people at risk of deviance and/ or with fewer opportunities.
Youth-workers in the role of tutor and game-designer in the role of user personas have transmitted their passion allowing youths to test how to use games in a different context, keeping it healthy and fun so that can bring a positive social change .
The #Gameroom is now a space that welcomes people of different cultures from all over the neighborhood as well as the city, with a great passion in common: play and design games.
Key objectives for sustainability
Allowing the #GameRoom to prosper means making it ready to host people and projects.
Among the general sustainability objectives, the number 4 of the UN agenda reads: quality education.
Specifically, 4.4 and 4.7.
We have strongly supported all the increases in the number of young people and adults who have the necessary skills, including technical and professional skills, for employment, decent work and entrepreneurship.
To do this we got an offer of meetings, jobs, projects and workshops in which the community of game-designers and enthusiasts have been able to meet industry professionals and engage in the development of products and business projects that find an outlet in the market of games, publishing, transformative experiences and non-formal education.
We strive to make it possible for all students to acquire the knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development, through education for sustainable development and sustainable lifestyles, human rights, gender equality, the promotion of a culture of peace and nonviolence , Global citizenship and the appreciation of cultural diversity and the contribution of culture to sustainable development, and this is happening thanks to the continuous proposal of social and environmental projects that are carried out in the #Gameroom. One of the many can be read on the website www.k2games.info, the result of a key action 2 dedicated to environmental sustainability and the development of a more responsible consumer idea.
The economic sustainability of the project is guaranteed by the fact that: costs are reduced by the principle of re-use in furniture; personnel costs are covered by revenue from self-handling; the sale of services pays for the ancillary costs of using space and a cash fund for extra expenses.
Key objectives for aesthetics and quality
The room has been designed to optimize the activities that take place inside.
A portion of the walls have been repainted to turn it into a blackboard where the designers can project and mark ideas, thoughts and significant moments.
The design of the furniture is functional to make the unique gaming experience.
The #GameRoom is equipped with a virtual dimension workstation equipped with a computer and two screens, of which one is installed on the wall, which if necessary is able to provide service information, to host banners or important and significant conferences.
In addition to the game station, there are some couches that creates a small relax area.
Throughout the room, pieces of furniture such as shelves, crates and boxes of all kinds have the function of preserving: the prototyping material of games, the publishing products made available to users, the handicraft productions and the sceneries necessary to the external preparations and to the presentations to an audience other to the standard.
How do we expand the potential of this space?
It's our intention to install new virtual workstations in order to become useful terminals for 3D printing and in-house making;
we also want to renovate the furniture by replacing some obsolete one and buy new material for prototyping and design activities;
In the last resort, it is our responsibility to expand the relax area, without losing coherence with the current design of the room.
Key objectives for inclusion
The #GameRoom Lab is born to gift the city with a public space where everyone can be hosted despite of differences and inequalities.
This space aims at granting to female gender a full and effective opportunity of participation and equal rights in lead processes in every level.
We do that by enabling everyone to technology use and particularly to enable a full awareness when approaching to information and communication technology promoting women empowerment.
We adopt policies that promotes gender equality such as gender balance criterias in project implementation and women empowerment of women and girls at every level.
More than 50% of workshops are leaded by girls and women and the coordinator of the kids service and her vice are both women.
We are aware of work rights and we promote a safe environment for every worker coming from every ethnis and culture.
We promote a sustainable work aiming at tourism field so that new job positions are open and that local culture can be promoted as well.
Our workshops are orientet to decrease unemplyement rate especially in the youth field and we do that through gamified working processes and carreers.
Last aim is reaching empowerment and promotion of social inclusion practices, economy and politics for everyone, without any distinction and difference.
Results in relation to category
With this project we managet to reach different results in Reinvented places to meet and share.
This is because the space has been seen by the community as a place where to discover and share a passion with new persons to meet and thanks to different projects, leaded by tutors and game-designer who live this space, we created a serie of activities that were interesting and engaging local community participants because they gave to everyone the chance to find a new spot in this world.
Our training courses were providing new learnings and new access to knowledge that enabled a team of participants to become the main team of a kids empowerment service that aim at create a safe space where kids and youth can learn leaded by youthworkers.
Those kids are coming from poor families or have fewer opportunities such as economis obstacles or social obstacles.
This brought to us different other stakeholders willing to invest money and resources and giving us the opportunity to enanche the service by consequencially giving visibility to the whole URBACT project, not only at our little and small #GameRoom.
How Citizens benefit
We use games as a tool used by youthworkers to engage youth and kids.
This helped us in being in touch with families as well.
Mothers and fathers of this generation are always looking for a way to improve their effect and the impact that they can have on their kids education.
Parents are citizens as well.
Giving their kids the chance to become aware of environmental issues as well as respectful for diversity and ability to be inclusive means giving to their parents new informations, different from those who are coming from mass media and more reliable since are coming from an hands-on approach to the facts.
The social facts are usually becoming main topics among community participants and since those participants are game-design skills bringers, those facts are analyzed and re-shaped in the form of games so that players can become more aware of what is actually going on in the world.
An example of what has been developed in the #GameRoom we can write about K2 Recycling Party: a competitive board game (card game type) that can be played by 3 to 7 people. It tackles the issues of responsible consumption of food, recycling and overuse of food packaging.
In this game, players try to win by scoring the most points while bringing food to the party. To earn points, players need to put together full menus. Recycling as much as possible and reusing the food packaging will add valuable points to whoever takes up this practice. Therefore, players need to decide individually what kind of points they want to gain to win the game.
Innovative character
Activities lead in the #GameRoom are gmified so that a more consistent engagement can be provided and a bigger number of users can be involved.
This is a gamification technique that takes mechanics from game engines and apply them to a non-gaming context.
The advantage of using this tool is that we can engage more youth and new users by reaching their understanding in a shorter time and by providing them a wide space where to share needs and necessities.
We don't keep this knowledge for us becasue we believe in openess principles and we want to reach out more people that we can by invoving in this new trend that starts from participants theirselves and that focus the general attention on someone else practice enabling a learning process ignited by copying and emulaton.
The more we play the more we can involve and engage in our GameRoom
