Gamified Solutions for Regional Development – InnoGS Parallel Session Highlights

Led by representatives from three partner organisations – Savonia University of Applied Sciences (Finland), University of Iceland – School of Education, and Region Västerbotten (Sweden) – the session brought together around 30 participants from across the NPA region. The aim was to demonstrate how gamification can support inclusion, creativity and co-creation in the context of territorial challenges such as youth outmigration, low participation, and limited access to services.

Hands-on experience: Role-playing to co-create solutions

Rather than offering only theoretical insights, the session gave participants the chance to experience gamification in practice through an engaging role-play exercise set in a fictional town hall meeting.

Each group was presented with a situation: a young person from the community is planning to leave the region. Their task was try to convince them to stay.

Participants were assigned stakeholder roles – such as youth, parent, entrepreneur, municipal official, youth worker, game designer or investor – and were asked to explore the situation from that perspective. The process included identifying the root causes of youth outmigration, co-developing solutions, and presenting arguments to the young person. In the end, the youth had the final say: will they stay or go?

Lively discussions, humour, and creativity filled the room. Examples included a young aspiring rock star being offered rehearsal space in a parent's basement, and a café entrepreneur opening up internship opportunities. Out of five fictional “young people”, all chose to stay – provided that certain conditions were met.

Inspiring cases from the InnoGS project

The session also included two real-life examples from the InnoGS project.

The first presented the work of Myst1s, a volunteer game streamer with 35,000 followers on Twitch, who has built an intergenerational online community where dialogue and inclusion happen naturally through play. His example showed how digital spaces can facilitate conversations across age groups, especially when trust and shared interests are present.

The second case highlighted a creative co-working space in Jörn, Sweden, developed with the involvement of project partner Creative Crowd. This rural hub supports collaboration, attracts digital professionals, and serves as a replicable model for how to utilise empty buildings in sparsely populated areas to strengthen local innovation ecosystems.

Participant reactions and next steps

The session was met with enthusiastic feedback. Many participants expressed interest in applying the methods in their own regions and organisations. Several took copies of the role templates and materials with them, and new connections across borders were formed.

The role-play method was seen as not only fun and engaging, but also deeply effective in bringing different perspectives together, sparking dialogue, and co-creating concrete ideas. One participant who had missed the session remarked afterwards: “So this was where all the fun was!”

The InnoGS session demonstrated how play and participation can go hand in hand, and how gamified tools can empower stakeholders to become active contributors in solving complex regional challenges.

Download the session presentation ⟶