Article
Shermon Cruz1,2, Toney Hallahan3, Nicole Anne Parreño3
1Research Fellow, Development Academy of the Philippines; Chief Futurist, Center for Engaged Foresight
2Associate Director, Planning and Policy, Western Sydney Planning Partnership
2Program Manager, Center for Engaged Foresight
Abstract
This practice-oriented article examines how a game-based foresight method can be designed and refined to support regenerative city futures thinking. Regenerative X was developed from earlier research on alternative futures for Philippine cities and tested through two iterative participatory playtesting rounds. The initial prototype combined sustainability priorities, city archetypes, influencers of change, and wildcards; feedback led to a revised version incorporating personas, sectors, assigned group roles, staged scenario building, and delayed disruption. An international playtest involving twenty-two participants in three teams produced contrasting regenerative city scenarios and provided evidence for design refinement. The playtests suggest that structured sequencing can make complex foresight concepts more accessible, while archetypes protect the plurality of futures, personas encourage perspective-taking, and wildcards reveal systemic vulnerabilities. The article contributes nine practice-based design principles for creating participatory foresight games, while recognising that the small, self-selecting playtests do not establish population-level learning outcomes.
Keywords
Regenerative cities, Foresight games, Participatory foresight, Scenario building, Futures literacy
Introduction
This report documents the development, testing, and refinement of Regenerative X, a game-based foresight method designed to make regenerative city scenario building accessible to participants with different levels of futures expertise. It presents the practical origins of the game, the rationale for its core mechanics, the changes made between two playtesting rounds, the scenarios generated during testing, and the design lessons that emerged. The report is guided by one question: How can a game-based foresight method be designed and iteratively refined through participatory playtesting to support regenerative city futures thinking?
The report is practice-oriented. It does not treat the scenarios as predictive findings. Instead, it uses them as evidence of how participants interacted with the rules, prompts, personas, wildcards, and collaborative narrative process. The main contribution is a tested design pathway and a set of practical principles for facilitators and designers who wish to use play to support futures literacy, systems awareness, and regenerative thinking.
Background and Purpose
Regenerative X builds on the DAP-GSPDM funded project, From Resilience to Regeneration: Reimagining Philippine Cities 2050 through Scenarios and Causal Layered Analysis (Cruz & Hallahan, 2021). That earlier project examined the forces shaping Philippine city futures and generated four alternative futures through a hybrid scenario process. A key recommendation was to translate the research into a foresight game that could extend public and professional dialogue on regenerative urban futures. The game development initiative therefore sought to transform research findings into an accessible, playable format. The development process, game materials, and initial playtesting documented in this article are derived in part from the unpublished Regenerative X: A City Futures Game project report (Cruz, Hallahan & Kahn, 2025).
The game development initiative therefore sought to transform research findings into an accessible, playable format. It was intended for policymakers, local government representatives, planners, educators, sustainability professionals, community actors, futurists, and participants with limited prior exposure to foresight. The design needed to support a workshop of approximately ninety minutes, enable individual and collective scenario construction, and remain useful to both newcomers and experienced practitioners. This emphasis on accessibility and contextual relevance is consistent with calls to localise futures practice within Asia-Pacific settings (Cruz et al., 2016).
The project had three practical objectives. First, it converted the drivers, emerging issues, archetypes, and insights from the earlier regenerative cities study into playable materials. Second, it combined scenario methods, the Sustainable Development Goals, personas, sectors, and disruptive events within a coherent game structure. Third, it developed and tested a proof-of-concept game with clearly defined materials, rules, sequencing, and facilitation guidance. The game draws on one of the authors’ prior experience developing an award-winning foresight game called Dreams and Disruptions. Figure 1 summarises the purpose, core design objectives, and intended learning outcomes of Regenerative X.
Fig 1: Purpose and design objectives of Regenerative X.
Why Play Matters in Futures Practice
Games allow participants to experiment with alternative futures in ways that conventional presentations and analytical exercises may not. In futures practice, play can make abstract concepts tangible, create space for multiple perspectives, and support experiential learning. Dator (2017) argues that gaming enables active engagement with alternative futures, while Inayatullah (2017) describes gaming as a way of knowing that engages cognitive, embodied, relational, and imaginative capacities. Miller (2018) similarly frames futures literacy as the capacity to use imagined futures to understand and act in the present. Embodied and experiential approaches can also deepen relational and participatory forms of futures learning (Bussey, 2014; Candy, 2018; Cruz, 2026), while the growing use of gamified approaches reflects a broader shift in professional foresight practice (Daheim, 2020).
Regenerative X treats play as a structured form of anticipatory inquiry. Its mechanics are not included merely for entertainment. Random prompts widen the range of possibilities considered. Personas require participants to view a future from situated social positions. Scenario archetypes prevent the exercise from collapsing into a single ideal future. Wildcards introduce uncertainty and test whether an emerging narrative can adapt. Group synthesis makes assumptions visible and requires participants to negotiate differences. Together, these mechanics create a designed learning environment in which participants practise long-term thinking, systems awareness, and collaborative meaning-making. The use of contrasting archetypes follows the principle that alternative futures should remain plural rather than converge prematurely on a single preferred image (Inayatullah, 2013). The use of disruption also reflects postnormal conditions in which uncertainty and contradiction become central to inquiry (Sardar, 2010), while randomness can be used deliberately to build adaptive and antifragile thinking (Cruz, 2026; Taleb, 2012).
This approach also reflects serious game and game-based learning principles. Rules establish a common process, prompts provide creative constraints, player interaction produces feedback, and narrative-building turns dispersed ideas into a shared representation of a possible future. The design challenge is therefore to maintain enough structure to support learning without making the game so prescriptive that it restricts imagination. These choices align with game-design approaches that use rules, constraints, motivation, and feedback to structure meaningful participation (Chou, 2015; McGonigal, 2011).
Regenerative City Framing
Regenerative development moves beyond reducing harm and seeks to improve the relationships among ecological, social, cultural, economic, and institutional systems. Mang and Reed (2012) describe regenerative design as place-based and concerned with the evolving relationships among buildings, infrastructure, natural systems, communities, culture, economy, and governance. Cole, Oliver, and Robinson (2013) similarly emphasise the co-evolution of socio-cultural and ecological systems. Applied to cities, this perspective asks participants to imagine urban systems that restore ecological capacity, strengthen social well-being, and renew civic relationships rather than merely becoming more efficient. This orientation is also reflected in regenerative-city approaches that seek positive ecological and social outcomes rather than only reduced harm or efficiency gains (Arup, 2024; Girardet, 2010).
Regenerative X operationalises this framing by asking players to combine sustainability priorities with alternative city archetypes, sectors, social perspectives, time horizons, and disruptions. The aim is not to prescribe what a regenerative city should look like. It is to help participants test competing interpretations of regeneration and recognise the governance choices, trade-offs, exclusions, and unexpected consequences embedded in each future.
Design and Refinement Approach
The project used an iterative, practice-based development process integrating foresight, game design, participatory inquiry, and action learning. It drew on Inayatullah’s scenario archetypes, experiential futures, and gamification principles. Three archetypes were used in the playable version: Preferred, Disowned, and Outlier. The Integrated archetype was omitted because the workshop was designed to generate contrasting futures rather than require participants to reconcile them into a single synthesis. The methodological combination was informed by scenario archetypes (Inayatullah, 2013), experiential futures and futures gaming (Candy, 2018), and actionable gamification principles (Chou, 2015; McGonigal, 2011).
The development process moved through research, initial design, prototype development, playtesting, review, and redesign. Iteration did not mean that the team mechanically returned to the beginning after every stage. It meant that observations and participant feedback from each test were used to revisit earlier design decisions. For example, feedback on time pressure changed the pacing rules; difficulty integrating perspectives led to assigned group roles; and the need for more situated narratives led to the addition of personas and sectors. The second version was therefore a direct response to evidence generated during the first playtest. This feedback-led movement between testing and redesign is consistent with serious-game development, where mechanics must be evaluated through participant use rather than only through conceptual design (Sweeney, 2017). Figure 2 illustrates the iterative development journey from research and prototyping through workshop testing, redesign, and action learning.
Fig 2: Regenerative X development journey from research and prototyping to
workshop testing and action learning.
Table 1: Regenerative X development and refinement process.
Version 1.0: Initial Prototype and First Playtest
Version 1.0 drew on four core elements: the Sustainable Development Goals, regenerative city archetypes for 2050, influencers of change, and wildcards. Individual participants or groups drew a common set of cards and used them as prompts to construct a short city scenario. Before play, facilitators introduced the idea of regenerative cities and the alternative city archetypes derived from the earlier research. Participants then tested whether the combination of random prompts and a short writing period could support collaborative sense-making and scenario development. The initial content and city archetypes were adapted from the earlier regenerative-cities study (Cruz & Hallahan, 2021). Table 1 outlines the stages of the Regenerative X development process together with the purpose and outputs of each stage.
The first workshop used the same randomly selected prompts for all participants. The shared prompt set included SDG 13 on climate action, a 2050 disowned city future, pandemics, zero waste, local government autonomy, and the re-naturalisation of rivers, drains, and waterways. The resulting mini-scenarios demonstrated that the same prompts could produce different narratives. One group imagined a dark regenerative city in which devolution and public-health control were captured by extremists. Another described autonomous local governments responding to climate emergencies while corruption undermined large-scale ecological interventions. Table 2 presents the shared prompt set used during the first prototype playtest to examine how identical inputs generated different scenario narratives.
Table 2: Shared prompts used in the Version 1.0 playtest.
Design Lessons from Version 1.0
The first playtest showed that the basic card combination could generate imaginative scenarios quickly, but it also exposed several design limitations. Ten minutes was workable for experienced scenario writers but too compressed for participants who needed time to interpret unfamiliar concepts. The shared prompts encouraged comparison across groups, yet the absence of explicit player perspectives sometimes produced generalised city descriptions. Group discussion also depended heavily on informal facilitation because participants had no assigned responsibilities for recording, synthesising, or presenting their ideas.
The redesign therefore extended the scenario development period, added visual prompts, and introduced group roles such as Scribe, Spokesperson, and City Planner. Personas were added to make social perspectives explicit, while sector cards narrowed the field of inquiry enough to support more detailed discussion. Wildcards were repositioned as a second-stage disruption rather than being included in the initial prompt set. This sequencing allowed groups to establish a coherent city future before stress-testing it. Blank cards were retained to permit participant-defined influences, and scenario titles were added to support memory, comparison, and synthesis. The expanded wildcard set drew on the earlier research, the Dreams and Disruptions game, and contemporary global-risk scanning (Cruz & Hallahan, 2021; Cruz, 2026; World Economic Forum, 2025). Table 3 summarises the evidence-based revisions made after Version 1.0 and how these informed the design of Version 2.0.
Table 3: Evidence-based modifications from Version 1.0 to Version 2.0.
Version 2.0: Revised Game and International Playtest
The second workshop recruited participants through targeted invitations and snowball outreach across futures, sustainability, academic, and game-based practice networks. The final cohort comprised twenty-two participants from the Philippines, Russia, Kenya, Brazil, Israel, Singapore, Australia, and India. Participants worked in three facilitated teams. The diversity of the cohort was useful for testing whether the game could support shared scenario construction across different professional and cultural perspectives, although the workshop was not designed as a representative evaluation of national or regional views. Table 4 presents the five card decks introduced in Version 2.0 and explains the methodological role each deck plays in the gameplay.
Table 4: Version 2.0 card decks and their design functions.
Gameplay as a Participatory Foresight Process
Version 2.0 was structured as a staged participatory foresight process rather than a set of isolated card draws. Participants first formed small playgroups and drew a shared combination of an SDG pillar, sector, archetype, time horizon, and persona. Each player then developed an individual view of the regenerative city from the assigned perspective. This stage created space for quieter participants to formulate ideas before group discussion and prevented the first speaker from defining the entire scenario.
Participants next shared their individual futures and wove them into one collective narrative. The synthesis stage required the group to negotiate conflicting assumptions, priorities, and values rather than simply place separate ideas side by side. A wildcard was then introduced to disrupt the emerging future. By delaying disruption until a baseline scenario had been established, the game made adaptation visible: participants had to decide what changed, what remained resilient, who benefited, and which vulnerabilities were exposed. Each group concluded by naming its scenario and presenting it for collective reflection. The final presentation acted as a feedback loop by allowing participants to compare the effects of different archetypes, personas, sectors, and disruptions.
Playtest Outputs
The three teams produced distinctive scenarios. These outputs are included not as predictions or as a comprehensive analysis of regenerative cities, but as evidence of how the revised game mechanics shaped thinking. The disowned scenario foregrounded control and unequal access. The outlier scenario expanded peace and cooperation beyond familiar human institutions. The preferred scenario linked tourism, energy, food systems, and local exchange. In each case, the wildcard altered the narrative and exposed assumptions that were less visible in the initial scenario. Table 5 provides an overview of the three scenarios developed during the international playtest and shows how varying card combinations resulted in distinct visions of regenerative futures.
Table 5: Version 2.0 playtest outputs.
Figure 3 provides a visual synthesis of the Version 2.0 workshop, showing how participant outputs and design feedback were integrated during collective reflection. The visual scribe captured the three scenario archetypes, the shared design prompts, and participant feedback requesting stronger regenerative elements, greater accessibility for non-futurists, and clearer stakeholder categories. Its analytical value lies in showing how narrative outputs and design feedback were produced in the same facilitated learning environment.
Fig 3: Visual record of the Version 2.0 workshop.
Design Findings and Practical Lessons
The playtests revealed that accessibility depended less on simplifying futures concepts than on sequencing them carefully. Participants could work with archetypes, long time horizons, and systemic disruptions when each concept had a clear role in the gameplay. The combination of cards reduced the burden of starting from a blank page, while the staged process prevented the number of prompts from becoming unmanageable. This suggests that complex foresight methods can be made accessible through scaffolding rather than by removing conceptual depth.
The archetype cards were important because they protected plurality. Without them, participants might have treated regeneration as an automatically positive and harmonious future. The Preferred, Disowned, and Outlier frames encouraged the groups to examine how regeneration could become equitable, coercive, contradictory, or culturally unfamiliar. The scenarios therefore demonstrated that regenerative futures should be treated as contested social and political possibilities rather than a single ideal destination. In this sense, archetypes functioned as structured alternatives rather than predictions, consistent with established scenario practice in futures studies (Dator, 2017; Inayatullah, 2013).
Personas strengthened perspective-taking by locating abstract urban change within the experience and authority of particular actors. The law-enforcer perspective contributed to the emergence of carbon policing and surveillance. The worker perspective shifted attention to exploitation, workplace culture, and restorative justice. The tourist perspective connected mobility, cultural exchange, energy use, and local participation. The personas did not guarantee empathy, but they required participants to identify whose viewpoint was being represented and whose might remain absent. The use of personas also supported embodied and situated engagement by asking participants to reason from perspectives other than their own (Bussey, 2014).
Wildcards were the most direct mechanism for making uncertainty actionable. They did more than add surprise. Introduced after the initial scenario, they created a before-and-after comparison and revealed the adaptive limits of each future. Sea-level rise exposed the vulnerability of centralised control, extraterrestrial arrival expanded the scale of moral inclusion, and food shortage forced the preferred city to connect energy and food systems. This sequencing transformed disruption into a structured feedback loop rather than a decorative narrative twist. Treating disruption as a staged feedback mechanism is consistent with foresight gaming approaches that make uncertainty experiential and test the resilience of an emerging scenario (Cruz, 2026; Inayatullah, 2017; Sweeney, 2017).
Collaborative narrative weaving was essential to the learning process. Individual scenario generation widened participation and protected diverse contributions. Group synthesis then required negotiation, interpretation, and systems connection. The final presentation allowed comparison among groups and made the design effects of different card combinations visible. The scenario title served as a compact narrative device that helped participants remember, communicate, and discuss the future they had created. Collaborative narrative weaving supported the use of imagined futures as a shared resource for present learning and collective sense-making (Miller, 2018).
The tests also revealed the importance of facilitation. Regenerative X is not a self-executing card game. Facilitators must explain the archetypes, manage pacing, encourage participation, probe causal connections, and prevent the group from treating wildcards as purely fantastical. Clear facilitation prompts are especially important for participants unfamiliar with scenario methods. At the same time, too much facilitator direction can narrow imagination. The practical task is to provide structure while preserving participant ownership of the narrative. This balance between structured guidance and participant ownership is central to meaningful game-based and experiential futures practice (Candy, 2018; Chou, 2015). Table 6 consolidates the practical design principles that emerged from both rounds of playtesting and refinement.
Table 6: Design principles emerging from Regenerative X playtesting.
Implications for Futures and Game-Based Learning Practice
Regenerative X demonstrates how a foresight game can function as a designed learning environment. Its contribution lies less in the novelty of any single component than in the integration of archetypes, sustainability prompts, sectors, personas, disruptions, and collaborative storytelling within a short workshop sequence. The game translates futures concepts into actions that participants can perform: drawing a perspective, shifting time horizons, constructing a system, encountering disruption, negotiating differences, and communicating a coherent future. The sequence reflects established arguments that futures learning becomes more accessible when participants actively create, experience, and negotiate alternative futures rather than receive them passively (Bussey, 2014; Inayatullah, 2017; Miller, 2018).
The report also reinforces the importance of continuous redesign in foresight games. Sweeney (2017) shows that foresight games require localisation, experimentation, attention to pacing, and mechanisms for capturing complex outputs. Regenerative X reached a similar practical conclusion. Game mechanics must be tested in use because participant behaviour may differ from designer expectations. A prompt that appears clear on paper may be ambiguous during play, while a simple role or sequencing change may substantially improve participation and learning.
For practitioners, the method is most suitable when the goal is to open dialogue, build shared language, surface assumptions, and generate contrasting scenario narratives. It should not be treated as a substitute for detailed policy analysis, modelling, or representative public consultation. Its strongest use is as an entry point or bridge to deeper foresight processes such as causal layered analysis, systems mapping, backcasting, strategy development, or deliberative engagement. These follow-on methods are consistent with the broader futures-studies repertoire for deepening assumptions, connecting systems, and moving from alternatives to action (Inayatullah, 2013).
Limitations and Next Development Priorities
The report is based on two facilitated playtesting rounds with relatively small, self-selecting groups. The second cohort was internationally diverse but included many participants already connected to futures, sustainability, research, or facilitation communities. The evidence therefore supports design learning rather than claims about population-level learning outcomes. Participant feedback was used to refine the game, but the project did not apply a standardised pre- and post-test of futures literacy, systems thinking, or behavioural change.
Future testing should include groups with little or no foresight experience, local government and community participants in specific cities, and sessions delivered by facilitators who were not involved in the game’s design. Comparative testing could examine which combinations of roles, time horizons, and wildcards produce productive complexity without cognitive overload. Further work should also develop clearer documentation templates, accessible visual materials, and evaluation measures that capture both participant experience and changes in anticipatory capability. Such evaluation would allow future studies to distinguish immediate engagement from measurable changes in futures literacy and anticipatory capability (Miller, 2018).
Conclusion
Regenerative X evolved from a simple card-based scenario exercise into a staged participatory foresight method. The first prototype showed that random prompts could generate imaginative city futures, but it also exposed problems of pacing, perspective, sequencing, and group coordination. Version 2.0 responded by adding personas, sectors, group roles, longer reflection time, a separate wildcard stage, participant-defined cards, and scenario naming. These changes made the learning process clearer and gave each mechanic a distinct methodological purpose.
Participants practised long-term reasoning, alternative scenario construction, perspective-taking, systems connection, and adaptation under disruption. Facilitators and designers learned that accessibility requires careful scaffolding, that regenerative futures must remain plural and contestable, and that wildcards are most useful when they operate as feedback mechanisms rather than as isolated surprises. The project’s practical contribution is therefore a tested design pathway and nine design principles for creating accessible game-based foresight engagements. These outcomes are consistent with futures-literacy and embodied-learning perspectives that emphasise active practice, reflection, and relational engagement (Bussey, 2014; Miller, 2018).
The method remains limited by the scale and composition of the playtests. Further research should test transferability across cities, cultures, participant groups, and facilitation settings. Within these limits, Regenerative X provides a practical example of how non-futurists and futures practitioners can use structured play to explore regenerative city possibilities, question assumptions, and build collective anticipatory capacity.
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Acknowledgement
This study was carried out with the support and funding of the Graduate School of Public and Development Management (GSPDM) at the Development Academy of the Philippines (DAP). The authors are deeply grateful to Dr. Lizan E. Perante-Calina, Dean of DAP-GSPDM, for her support and encouragement throughout the course of this research. We also extend our heartfelt appreciation to Dr. Ma. Oliva Z. Domingo, Supervising Fellow of DAP-GSPDM, whose review and evaluation improved the quality of this work.