“Serious Yet Fun”: Games as Tools for Digital Development

This piece explores the use of serious games in international development spaces, acknowledges their challenges and limitations, and considers ways to create thoughtful gaming scenarios that inspire learning and action.

Over the 2024 holiday season, many gathered with family and friends to engage in games, whether indoors or outdoors, silly or serious. (Cluedo, for instance, can feel quite serious.) The holiday season often highlights the appeal of games, from lively board game nights with family to quiet moments spent solving puzzles.

As routines have resumed in the new year, this “games season” may already feel distant. However, the spirit of play can continue to inspire work and creativity in areas such as development, community building, and activism. The engaging and immersive nature of games provides a unique space for critical thinking and meaningful discussions, especially when addressing issues of justice and equity. A game is “an activity that one engages in for amusement or fun.” Clark C. Abt first introduced the term “serious games” in his 1970 book of the same name. He defined serious games as those that could be “played seriously or casually” with an explicit educational purpose beyond mere entertainment.

In the context of international development, serious games have emerged as powerful tools leveraging interactive and immersive experiences. Serious games have been gaining traction as transformative tools for development practitioners, and are now used to raise awareness, educate, and promote behavior change in areas such as poverty alleviation, healthcare, and environmental sustainability. Titles like PeaceMaker, Evoke, and UrbanSim illustrate how games can drive collaboration and problem-solving by simplifying complexity and encouraging participants to engage from fresh perspectives. Similar examples are David Taverner’s immersive work in space and climate and the Wilson Center’s Serious Games Initiative, which has games on managing plastic waste and navigating AI, just to name a few. As the field continues to mature, more rigorous evaluation is needed to fully understand the opportunity and potential of serious games on development goals and to refine their application in addressing global challenges.

Serious games enable players to simulate real-world scenarios, test strategies and assumptions in hypothetical scenarios, and build empathy in a safe, risk-free environment. Games create immersive spaces where abstract challenges become tangible, and where we can lay out the complexities of issues like poverty alleviation, gender equity, or climate resilience. Through simulation, challenges, and restrictive sets of rules, games introduce scenarios that not only force practitioners to think, but create a flat structure for others to challenge our assumptions and worldviews. In a family context, this could level the “playing field” between grandparents and grandchildren. At a company level, it could be between senior leadership, consultants, administrators, etc. The constellation of gamers with different worldviews makes the experience rich. Moreover, the power of playing games is also reflected in their ability to foster inclusion and creativity; games create a shared space where participants feel safe to contribute ideas, regardless of their role or expertise. This is especially critical in collaborative environments like development practice, or when championing equity in any sector.

“Please design a session on digital and livelihoods”

At Caribou’s November retreat, four of us (Jesús Tabares, Savita Bailur, Grace Natabaalo, and Hanna Laufer) were asked to lead a company-wide session on the intersection of digital and livelihoods, a crucial theme in Caribou’s portfolio. We knew we had to make the agenda productive yet fun. When brainstorming ideas for the most impactful format, some of us thought storytelling would be powerful, while others felt it might create artificial distinctions of “presenters” and “listeners.” Jesús, Community Manager for the Mastercard Strive portfolio managed by Caribou, proposed a “Future of Livelihoods” game. The aim of this approach was to foster collaboration, challenge assumptions, and create a shared space for innovative thinking — as well as have fun, of course.

We needed to connect the diverse lenses through which each team member had recently engaged with livelihoods — gender, youth, agriculture, or small businesses — so we created the Future of Livelihoods Lab, a game that captured everyone’s curiosity, creativity, and ingenuity. This game featured three decks of cards with an individual theme: Challenge, Innovation, and Client. Each team drew one card from each deck, outlining a specific livelihoods challenge, a cutting-edge innovation, and the profile of an imagined client with unique needs. For instance, a team might address the challenge of digital access gaps in rural Ghana through the innovation of mobile learning platforms to empower the client, young entrepreneurs represented by the Aspire Youth Collective. The objective was to design a strategy that seamlessly integrated the challenge, innovation, and client profile into a cohesive and impactful solution.

The game unfolded with lively discussions and a strategic swap option, allowing teams to exchange one card for another if their initial combination felt mismatched. Teams were given twenty minutes to craft their proposals and then pitch their strategies in two-minute presentations to a panel acting as a donor board, which scored each idea on creativity, client alignment, and scalability.

The dynamic, fast-paced nature of the “Future of Livelihoods Lab” energized the retreat, fostering innovative ideas and revealing cross-cutting themes among participants. A prize was awarded to recognize how this thoughtful and immersive activity transformed a pressing topic into a collaborative and enjoyable exercise.

Despite their promise, serious games also come with challenges. For games to resonate, they must be culturally relevant and accessible, ensuring all participants feel included. Additionally, power dynamics within groups can shape the experience, requiring careful facilitation, thoughtful mechanic and rule design, and adequate stewardship to maintain equity and inclusivity. Finally, practitioners must be sensitive when integrating play with serious issues. Not all serious games are focused on development, and not all development-focused games are necessarily serious. A decade ago, Jaded Aid made waves — though not without controversy — for its sharp, self-referential critique of the sector.

What excites us today is a very different approach, one that moves away from self-critique (though it remains necessary) and toward fostering meaningful learning and growth.

The questions of who designs, executes, and participates in a game must all be addressed thoughtfully. At a company level, there should be a collective understanding of the purpose of a game, and a sense of safety and security to raise points that might be different from others. This may not be the case at a community level, where power dynamics of “insiders” and “outsiders” or “game designers” and “participants” may emerge. Games may place a time and labor burden on participants. We may see evidence of groupthink, or fear to truly speak up, and reluctance to challenge cultural, social, and/or gendered hierarchies — critiques leveled at burdensome participatory methods more than twenty years ago by authors such as Cooke and Kothari in “Participation: The New Tyranny.”

In our case, the in-person “Future of Livelihoods Lab” allowed for group discussion, creative thinking, and innovation. By creating a structured but flexible environment, the game enabled participants to think critically and collaboratively without losing sight of the broader purpose. It was specifically crafted for an audience of colleagues, with a shared ethos and a comparable understanding of the topic and its dynamics. Setting assumptions like these requires deeper thinking, collaboration, and planning in community scenarios, where a well thought-out game could help make solutions emerge — or a poor one could make issues worse.

Our Caribou retreat experience underscored several benefits of using serious games in development work:

For Jesús, these benefits are grounded in his experience using games as trust-building tools in community settings:

Savita emphasizes how applying serious games in workplace scenarios encourages iterative thinking: “Games provide a relatively safe space where we can fail without real-world consequences.” For David Taverner, games are a powerful learning tool because “games are a form of ‘interactive storytelling’ and often hold our attention for long periods.”

While the “Future of Livelihoods Lab” was a useful exercise for Caribou, it’s just one example of how bringing games to work can enhance development practice, and iterating games can be just as important as creating new ones.

Savita plans to test and iterate further on the “Future of Livelihoods” game in the first class of her spring semester course “Human-Centred Digital Development” at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. While many international development students at “Northern” or “Western” universities come with good intentions, they can also come with assumptions around digital development, assumptions that can be questioned by using the game, thus raising awareness around barriers to digital livelihoods including access, relevance, literacy and use, and issues of social norms.

The real value of serious games lies in their ability to act as bridges — connecting people, ideas, and disciplines to create systemic change. Whether used in community workshops, classrooms, or multi-stakeholder forums, (serious?) games can foster dialogue, uncover new possibilities, and inspire bold action.

If you’d like to partner with Caribou to “play seriously”, contact us.