There is an urgent need for urban environments to be flood resilient due to increasing urbanization and climate change. This can be addressed by adopting sustainable drainage solutions (SuDS) in households. However, lack of knowledge and awareness among urban residents is a barrier. In this paper, we present an educational serious game called SuDSbury to overcome this barrier and a pre-/post-game survey-based evaluation to study whether the game can educate citizens (and to what degree). An exploratory study with 14 players across three game sessions suggests that playing SuDSbury induced changes in knowledge, comprehension, and personal norms regarding SuDS. However, comprehension of concepts related to urban drainage can be improved by increasing game realism. The game should be further tested with a larger sample and a diverse demographic of urban residents. The participants further found that SuDSbury is fun and engaging to play, making it suitable for broader public interventions.

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Urban water management (UWM) is a complex problem characterized by multiple alternatives, conflicting objectives, and multiple uncertainties about key drivers like climate change, population growth, and increasing urbanization. Serious games are becoming a popular means to support decision-makers who are responsible for the planning and management of urban water systems. This is evident in the increasing number of articles about serious games in recent years. However, the effectiveness of these games in improving decision-making and the quality of their design and evaluation approaches remains unclear. To understand this better, in this paper, we identified 41 serious games covering the urban water cycle. Of these games, 15 were shortlisted for a detailed review. By using common rational decision-making and game design phases from literature, we evaluated and mapped how the shortlisted games contribute to these phases. Our research shows that current serious game applications have multiple limitations: lack of focus on executing the initial phases of decision-making, limited use of storytelling and adaptive game elements, use of low-quality evaluation design and explicit indicators to measure game outcomes, and lastly, lack of attention to cognitive processes of players playing the game. Addressing these limitations is critical for advancing purposeful game design supporting UWM.@en