Designing serious games to foster responsible entrepreneurship for urban resilience: the case of Resurbis

The paper illustrates the use of narratives and process modeling to develop a serious game on urban resilience and responsible entrepreneurship. The development of serious games, following the educational paradigm of active learning, is as potentially effective as it is inherently complex. Responsible entrepreneurship and urban resilience turn out to be intricately multidisciplinary subjects, and the development of teaching- pedagogical tools requires a plural effort by experts with different professional and cultural backgrounds. Moreover, the domains of urban resilience and responsible entrepreneurship have blurred semantic boundaries and lend themselves to be approached by adopting multiple perspectives. Exploring these issues on a purely theoretical level could, however, erode the entertainment purposes that should distinguish game-based educational approaches. Delving into the single case of Resurbis, the paper presents the ways in which the game development team overcame the main critical issues. Specifically, as part of the development, process modeling was employed to support the synthetic representation of the narratives developed to enable the emotional involvement of learners as well as to ensure smooth communication in the multidisciplinary team.