If your aim at integrating your game design process in a local urban environment, the way you approach your stakeholders is key. Creating a consistent working group, encouraging active engagement, shaping a framework for open dialogue and feedback for your game is a gradual process that require, first and foremost, your commitment to the purpose.
Her is a step-by-step guide that will help you design your strategy for approaching and working with local stakeholders.
Step 1: Get to know your people
Search, Map, Document your key stakeholders (online research, world of mouth, desk research, field research etc.)
Step 2: Bring your community together
Publish an open call and invite stakeholders to a group meeting. Follow up on invitations list and make them feel like they are the most important representative in the group. Create a facebook event and share it to relevant facebook groups. Print some posters.
Step 3: Define your community
Are you diverse? Are young or old? Do you have a favorite meet-up space? Do you play games? Which stakeholders are more likely to play and understand a game? Which stakeholders are going to be more difficult to reach and engage? Who has already worked on that problem up to now?
Step 4: Co-decide the challenge your game will address
What is the most important challenge for each one?
What are the values your stakeholders share in common?
What makes your community more cohesive?
Which challenge is considered collectively most important?
What criteria are guiding the prioritization process?
Step 5: Include TRUST in your game and your design processes
The games should be developed in a way that they could include TRUST, as a value or feeling, a prerequisite, or a goal.
Be transparent in your intentions.
Clearly inform your participants of their obligations before asking them to commit. Discuss what they want to make out of it.
Maintain consistent communication before and after each meeting.
Step 6: Set your priorities
How does one characterize the wide- ranging and deeply held values of diverse stakeholders? Moreover, how does one prioritize the values implicated in the final decisions? Who gets to have the final say?
When you are opening up your process to external parties, you have to create a safe space for all the different opinions to be heard and be documented?
Step 6: Create feedback loops in your design process
During the design process, developments must be attained by feedback as participants` ideas cannot be reflected at once. Through regular feedback loops, communication among game designers and stakeholders is enhanced and continuously expanded. Try to communicate your process through clear and simple drawings or/and other representations in order to achieve more vivid discussions and reach a collective understanding (hopefully). As far as possible, stakeholders should feel that their values and desires are reflected in the game, evaluate it and develop a certain level of confidence in the final product.
Step 7: Celebrate success with all the stakeholders
this is an edited version from an original (?), authored by @MariaS & Anthi
[entry expanded after “who wrote this” comment]