Maximising the Impact of Games as Effective Participative Tools: The Rufopoly Resource Kit

Rufopoly is a participatory learning board game enabling players to undertake a journey through a fictitious rural urban fringe called RUFshire, answering questions and making decisions on development challenges and place-making; those answers then inform each player's vision for RUFshire. The encountered questions are determined by the roll of a die and based on primary data collected for a Relu project (2010-2012) about Managing Environmental Change at the Rural Urban Fringe. Rufopoly has been used extensively in early stages of projects and plans such as the pioneering Greater Birmingham and Solihull Local Enterprise Partnership spatial plan and has been used by government, EU project groups, local authorities, business, community groups, universities and schools. It has exposed audiences to issues associated with the delivery and trade-offs associated with planning and environmental issues at the fringe but crucially without the use of complex jargon.

We believe that the full potential and impact of Rufopoly has yet to be fully realised. There are several reasons for this:
1. Rufopoly was developed towards the end of our Relu project as an unplanned output for a conference run by Relu in 2011 on 'Who Should run the Countryside?'. Its success prompted its inclusion as an output.
2. There were insufficient funds for it to be successfully tested and integrated with policy and practice communities to maximise its utility as a learning tool as this was never the original intention of the project.
3. It is currently presented as a one size fits all board game of a hypothetical place. More time is needed to explore the potential of Rufopoly to become a generic platform for stakeholders wishing to develop their own versions of the tool to meet their own needs and to fill a widely recognised gap in the effectiveness of participatory tools for improved decsion making.

This knowledge exchange project addresses these deficiencies by drawing together the shared knowledge and previous experiences of designers and users of Rufopoly. This informs a series of interactive workshops in Wales, England and Scotland to identify how this kind of game-format can be enhanced into a more effective and multifunctional tool. This will help extend and embed the impact for a range of policy and practice partners in the form of a Rufopoly Resource Kit. By working collaboratively with end users we can identify how Rufopoly can be reconfigured across different user groups and organisations in tune with their agendas and needs. There are four stages to this project:
WP1: Review and learn lessons from previous Rufopoly experiences. This involves (1) an assessment of the actual results and findings from past games that were written up and the results analysed. (2) critical assessments of the strengths and weaknesses of Rufopoly from facilitators and core participants. We will draw priamirly from our UK experiences but are also able to secure insights from the international adaptations of Rufopoly from Nebraska (November 2013) and Sweden (2014).
WP2: Conduct a series of interactive workshops with different policy and practice audiences. These workshops will be held in England, Scotland and Wales using members of the research team and other participants. The purpose of these workshops is to (1) share results of WP1; (2) assess how the tool could be reconfigured to address the principla needs and challenges facing participants; and (3) prioritise feasible options for a Rufopoly Resource Kit.
WP3: Using WP1 and WP2 outcomes, we will design and trial (across our team) the Rufopoly 'Mk2' resource kit and associated materials/guidance.
WP4: Launch the Rufopoly Resource Kit and guidance in a live streamed global workshop event. This would; reveal the basic resource kit as co-designed by the team and enable testers of the resource kit to share their experiences maximising knowledge exchange and its range of potential applications.

This project is designed to maximize impact in policy and practice through its co-production ethic involving academic, policy and practice participants and audiences throughout the 4 work packages. Crucially the project team involves representatives across public, private and voluntary sectors who, in effect, perform Co-Investigator roles in keeping with Scott's previous ESRC research model.

Impact is embedded in the project aims and objectives where we seek to build from the current configuration of multiple player board-game formats into a more versatile and user-friendly resource kit that will enable different groups and agencies to modify and adapt the learning tool according to their own needs and priorities.

To date Rufopoly has been used largely to shape initial consultations of plans such as the award winning spatial plan from the Greater Birmingham and Solihull LEP, the Welsh Assembly Government planning consultations and GCSE A level Geography curriculum in W-Midlands schools. Our goal in this work is to extend the way in which the impact can be developed and enhanced by identifying key gaps in use of current participative tools and key needs of our user groups. This intelligence will inform the design of the new Rufopoly resource kit.

Who will benefit?
The prime beneficiaries of this research are represented and embedded in the project team to cover community groups, schools, local authorities, local enterprise partnerships, government agencies and non-departmental public bodies. Many of these have specifically committed staff resources and time to the project as part of the team. In addition policy-makers and practitioners who helped design Rufopoly in 2011 will be actively involved. The Rufopoly toolkit will be readily available and benefit other users within the beneficiary categories, potentially world-wide. Web site, twitter and video resources will ehlp publicise the project amongst wider publics.

How will they benefit from this research?
The project enables stakeholders to inform the future evolution of Rufopoly to address their particular needs. Through informing, designing, testing and evaluating the processes and outcomes together the resultant resource kit will be based on an effective knowledge exchange platform enabling many of the project team to perform a legacy component through their own networks of uses and value.

Whilst the project resources limit what can be developed we aim to have a resource that appeals to all stakeholders listed above. It will work across scales and sectors dealing with complex issues across policy and practice contexts. For example, potential benefits are for community groups carrying out neighbourhood plans; local authorities consulting over local plans; Local Enterprise Partnerships preparing their economic plans; pupils understanding the nature of the rural urban fringe as part of the national curriculum and exam board syllabuses. Furthermore, our partners will ensure that the governance needs of the Scottish, Welsh and English governments are addressed through identification of hooks within which a successful Rufopoly resource kit can be embedded.

Key is to move beyond the current board-format tool and to develop a full set of resources and guidance that enable the tool to become embedded more effectively in a range of different policy and decision making processes. To have maximum impact, however, there is a chicken and egg situation as we can not, nor should, prejudge what the favoured resources and guidance will look like in the bid process. This is where our co-production ethic comes in.

The research work will make a significant contribution to improving the quality of proactive consultation to inform policy and decision making processes. This is a key gap in the armory of many agencies at present and thus will significantly support core spatial planning and environment agenda