Chronica Mobilis
Serious pervasive game in Barcelona Raval (a gentrifying immigrant neighborhood) where teams of players move through real streets engaging with situated audio/visual storytelling about gentrification and immigration. Documented in Springer's 'Authoring a Serious Pervasive Game for Reflecting upon Urban Spaces' (2018) and cited in JMIR Serious Games 2023 systematic review.
Designed to be replayable across neighborhoods undergoing similar tension. Outcomes (player reflections, mapping data) were compared between sessions held in different barrios, with workshop facilitators surfacing which neighborhood produced richer collective narratives.
Player teams collaborate to solve location-anchored narrative challenges that require talking to other team members and (in some versions) interviewing actual residents. Building intra-team cohesion AND building bridges between players and local residents.
A Catalan / Spanish-language academic example missed by Anglocentric searches. Models how a game can deliberately make neighborhoods 'visible' to themselves and to outsiders. A softer, narrative-driven flavor of the BelongHub mechanic, useful for areas where leaderboards would feel crass.
Others in the same family
Colab.re - Brazilian municipal app with neighbourhood reports
Brazilian civic-engagement app where residents photograph and post urban problems (dengue hotspots, potholes, broken streetlights) geotagged to neighbourhoods. Reports flow to city hall for action and are visible to other residents who can upvote/comment. Won UN award as best urban app and a top-5 Government & Participation app.
Gigli.app + Fantagigli (Festa dei Gigli di Nola)
Official app for the UNESCO-recognized Festa dei Gigli, where eight enormous wooden obelisks (gigli) representing the historic guilds/neighborhoods of Nola are carried through the streets by paranze (crews of ~120 carriers each). Features live geolocation of each giglio, AR/3D content, an 'identity card' for each giglio (name of paranza, song lyrics), and the standout 'Fantagigli' fantasy-football-style game with a public leaderboard where users build teams from real paranze and earn points based on their performances. Built by Esthar startup with University Federico II Naples Physics Department.
Walksy / WalkOff (fog-of-war walking games)
Your city map starts under a mist; every step clears fog around your GPS position and reveals streets, parks, and landmarks. Add friends, join/create guilds, fight guild territory wars over city sectors.
Stridekick / Big Team Challenge / Step Count Challenge
Paths for All / Walking Scotland's national 4-week team walking challenge. Teams of 5 (workplaces, community groups, council departments) compete on cumulative steps. Big Team Challenge and Stridekick are commercial backends used by councils to run city-vs-city or department-vs-department editions on virtual maps (London, Route 66, Great Wall etc.).
Decidim process-groups + Barcelona/Helsinki/NYC participatory budgeting district tiers
Decidim's 'process groups' feature is explicitly designed for grouping parallel participatory budgets per district/neighbourhood. NYC's PB ran in 30 of 51 council districts in 2021-22, each with at least $1M to spend, residents drop pins on a map to pitch ideas. Helsinki's OmaStadi splits city budget by area (Itäinen, Eteläinen, Pohjoinen, etc.) with separate ideation, deliberation and vote per area.
Plant Your Street! (geogame)
Location-based geogame by Alenka Poplin (Iowa State / now Cornell) where neighbourhood residents play tree-selection and tree-placement scenarios over their actual block. Part of a broader Geogames research agenda (Poplin 2012/2018/2025) including Climate Geogames for urban heritage sustainability. Validated through workshops in Ames, Iowa.