How to say NO to the GAP - Gioco d’Azzardo Patologico (pathological gambling).
NO-GAP is a game/exhibition created with the goal of transmitting awareness-raising content about pathological gambling, through playful and interactive methods, with the final aim of prevention. It is based on the concept of "gamification": we use elements taken from the game's experience and applied them in non-gamified contexts to spread a message. The concept, already known in Europe, is not so widespread in Italy; that is making the NO-GAP exhibition an absolute novelty on the local scene.
Local
Italy
Municipalities of Romano di Lombardia, Treviglio, and Bergamo.
Mainly urban
It refers to other types of transformations (soft investment)
No
No
Yes
As a representative of an organization, in partnership with other organisations
Name of the organisation(s): Studio SHIFT srl SB Type of organisation: Benefit Company First name of representative: Elena Enrica Last name of representative: Giunta Gender: Female Nationality: Italy Function: CEO, Design director Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Via Latteria Town: Talamona Postal code: 23018 Country: Italy Direct Tel:+39 349 424 2471 E-mail:design@studioshift.it Website:http://www.studioshift.it/
Name of the organisation(s): ITACA Cooperativa Sociale Type of organisation: Non-profit organisation First name of representative: Agata Last name of representative: Faccialà Gender: Female Nationality: Italy Function: Legal representative Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Via Bartolomeo Colleoni 30 Town: Romano di Lombardia Postal code: 24058 Country: Italy Direct Tel:+39 0363 960881 E-mail:a.facciala@cooperativaitaca.it Website:https://cooperativaitaca.it/
The NO-GAP interactive game-exhibition pursued the objective of transmitting awareness-raising content regarding gambling and pathological gambling, through playful and interactive methods. The prevention of pathological gambling has been rooted in the protagonism of adolescents, the involvement of the community, and the use of tools between virtual and real life.
The project was developed around a twofold idea:
1\ The creation of a link between school and local communities, in terms of prevention actions, for the co-construction of a community's vision and heritage.
The intent was to overcome the logic of classical preventive intervention in the school context which, however effective, parcels out the adolescent's experience, looking for new “times and spaces” able to engage a wider target such as adults in the community, and including an initial elaboration with the adolescents themselves about the themes of addiction and gambling;
2\ The experimentation of a method that combines peer education with soma design fields and tools (e.g. the practice of gamification, co-design tools used to experience game design logic and approach).
Experiencing peer learning sessions students assimilate more and more effectively, rather than in individual learning contexts, and at the same time strengthen their interaction skills, in the group. For the development of the design solution (our interactive game-exhibition), we use co-design sessions at school, helping peer groups to design step-by-step their own game in “non-playful environments" (in our case an outdoor Escape room experience, at an urban scale).
ITACA Cooperative has been the main promoter of the project, which has envisaged the involvement of Studio Shift and Sfelab as technical partners. The process began in 2020 and used the restrictions adopted for the prevention of the pandemic as an opportunity to review and innovate the format of the intervention, which took place in hybrid modalities.
YOUNGSTERS
CODESIGN
GAMBLING PREVENTION
HIGH SCHOOL ENGAGEMENT
URBAN PLACES
The sustainability of meaning - the concept of the project was built with a strong networking action, initially between the proponents and later in the dialogue with the context, which involved schools, local public administrations (of the places where the game-exhibition actually took place) and “neighborhood” commercial actors.
Environmental sustainability - the idea of the project was born and implemented during the Covid-19 time and ss, with the need therefore to transpose all the usual practices (both per-to-peer education and co-design) into a digital environment. Once the first critical issues have been overcome, also connected to the rapid digital reorganization as required by the schools themselves, it is appropriate to highlight the "pros" that this negotiation has created, especially in terms of savings in consumption and travel costs for conductors and tutors. This made the sessions themselves more accessible to the overall participants. The digital management of processes has also allowed all participants, including students who are generally more shy and reserved in group situations in presence, to be able to participate in a protected way in all appointments, subjectively measuring their visibility and engagement.
With an eye also to practical achievements, on the environmental theme the choice to use the city, and its open spaces, as the main location stands out; seizing the double potential of outdoor places (therefore safer for the post-pandemic period) and small walking itineraries to promote gentle mobility and neighborhood exploration.
Last but not least, economic sustainability - The project was supported by the consortium company Risorsa Sociale Gera d'Adda of the Treviglio area and by the Solidalia consortium company of the Romano di Lombardia area, thanks to funding from the Bergamo Community Foundation.
The theme of aesthetics was conceived, in the project, as a cultural affordance of languages (and then also visual solutions) used to reach the main beneficiaries of the project, i.e. adolescents in the 14/18-year-old target range. For this reason, the multimedia interactive path for the NO-GAP game-exhibition was based on the concept of "gamification".
The idea was born taking inspiration from escape rooms and treasure hunts. In these games, the participants must use logic, intuition, knowledge of environments, and other personal skills. To be able to proceed in the game, and use the knowledge, they gradually acquire within the paths. The concept, already known in Europe, is not widespread in Italy, so to make the NO-GAP game-exhibition an absolute novelty on our national scene.
The multimedia contents have been designed to be familiar to young audiences: short-lived; bidirectional in the continuous search for users’ feedback; stories told in the first person, combining known historical events with personal ones; again stories which were adapted (such as content, style, and tone-of-voice) to the multiple categories of visitors (teens, young people, and adults, seniors) according to the targets highlighted by local data on the phenomenon of pathological gambling.
These are the ingredients we used to deeply touch the visitor and leave a lasting mark.
For the final, aesthetic development of the project, the interaction design studio Sfelab (Cantu, Italy) was involved. They professionally produced and finalized the contents as co-created with high school students, in the co-design sessions conducted by SHIFT and ITACA.
The game-exhibition aims to make the population aware of the issue of gambling, using a different and engaging methodology. With this perspective, we entered the local high schools by co-planning the experience - also from an educational point of view - together with the teachers and including it in the School-Work Program offer.
The participating schools were the higher institutes: ISS Zenale and Butinone, of Treviglio; Istituto Superiore Don Lorenzo Milani, of Romano di Lombardia, and the classical high school Sarpi in Bergamo City.
The main engagement activities addressed youngsters, from which their active involvement both in terms of the development of the narrative contents of the game (including suggestions about desirable User Experience) and in the design solutions (game steps and some User Interface ideas for the mobile application), have contributed to an overturning of traditional teacher/learner roles. The work was carried out with a view to developing an “educational community” in addition to youth protagonism: the young people became experts in the project objective and about the topic/problem of gambling. Thanks to the support of external technicians (SHIFT, ITACA, and subsequently Sfelab) they also competently discussed processes and solutions.
At the end of the process, teachers and parents became users of the NOGAP exhibition-game and therefore primary beneficiaries of the teaching experience, as well as in some cases secondary beneficiaries of the cultural experience itself (the app).
NO-GAP project aims to face the problem of preventing pathological gambling at community-scale and in city-context. Particularly through youngster engagement, and using -as solutions’ supports- popular practices (e.g. escape room) and virtual devices we made the experience really familiar to the desired target of users.
Sharing these premises, the process was accompanied by a constant dialogue between the school, the Territorial Areas (Public Administration), and the actors of the local communities -such as the parish priest, the mayor, the town's merchants, and volunteers- to agree on the urban spaces to be used, the logics and period of implementation, the involvement, and encouragement of merchants to engage in the game, the recruitment of volunteers to oversee and promote the NO-GAP.
After three different experiences, which took place in the Summer in as many three locations (Municipalities of Trevilgio, Romano di Lombardia and Bergamo city), a total amount of 2000 participants have been registered using the mobile application.
Pathological gambling is a phenomenon that has found growing sensitivity by the Lombardy Region which, through the regional law 8/2013, has promoted and supported actions aimed at preventing and contrasting forms of addiction, as well as at treating and taking care to the recovery of people who are affected by it.
For some years now, the Lombardy territories have been able to benefit from these resources to structure and planning processes strongly oriented towards the appropriateness of interventions, the integration and inter-sector nature of preventive actions, development of local governance actions of plural governance. NO-GAP game-exhibition is a good example based on the synergy of all the actors of the social and socio-health system: local authorities, the third sector, businesses, and trade associations, were horizontally engaged in the concept and thinking phase or in co-production of the initiative.
Under the supervision of ATS Bergamo (the local public body that manages policies and services answering people's needs) the ITACA Cooperative acted as an interpreter and promoter of the project which, as written, envisaged the involvement of the designers of Studio Shift, co-design experts, and the engineers of Sfelab, specialized in interaction and visual design. The technical partners worked actively on the planning and implementation of the process, the former, and on the finalization of the product, the latter, supporting the initiative for the whole implementation time. The ITACA Cooperative, on the other hand, provided indispensable educational support, with a specific focus on life skills and the peer-to-peer education approach, as well as the network of territorial relationships that have been essential for the NO-GAP project to generate consensus.
The health promotion and addiction prevention activity is carried out through projects promoted and supported by the Lombardy Region and the Regional School Office jointly. Their methodological approach includes Strategies for health promotion and addiction prevention; Promotion of educational strategies for life skills growth, as provided by the Health Promoting School program and the network of health promoting schools; Implementation of interventions subjected to evaluation of effectiveness.
The theoretical premise of the intervention is the community development approach integrated with peer education methodologies. It is based on scientific evidence and intervenes, and addresses all the most important individual and social factors that lead adolescents to adopt risky behaviors. It uses effective methods for the promotion of transversal skills and competencies; it provides students with elements of knowledge, subsidies, and tools useful for managing group situations and those at risk.
The Peer education approach is an intervention that is fully part of the effective preventive intervention methodologies recognized in scientific literature. In the NO-GAP game-exhibition project that approach met design domains: particularly co-creation (both co-design and co-production) and interaction design.
The Peer education approach was born in the 60s in the USA and values learning within a group of peers or people belonging to the same status. Design, on the other side, with its natural learning-by-doing approach, has provided the enabling settings and practical tools for to support collaborative activations and facilitated groups during design sessions and decision-making processes.
Brainstorming techniques, user stories, personas profiles, and storyboards are just a few examples of design tools we used. Ice-breaking exercises, observation of social dynamics, and the care for the emotional impact within the group have been nurtured by educators and teachers.
The intention at the heart of this choice is to use the "experience of the game" in a positive way to go against the opposite experience of addiction; this was the meta-message: we wanted to prove and let the user experience that with the game you also can grow and change, see the world with a different look.
The multimedia interactive installations offer the possibility to involve young people first of all, but also families and teachers, and to make them feel like an active part of the communication process including a very wide variety of final targets. Multimedia has made it possible to involve the visitor in a proactive way by helping to fix concepts, sensations, and discoveries in the mind/memory and in the body (crossing the city alone or in groups).
The NO-GAP game-exhibition process has been divided into three main phases, with peculiar outcomes:
1\ the activation of local network and consensus;
2\ the process of co-creation made by co-design (learning session with students about topic and co-design sessions at school) and co-production (action lab at school) activities;
3\ the professional finalization of output which consists of the digital game (mobile app) and related outdoor exhibitions’ supports.
Looking back at that process we can argue that the format itself is highly transferrable, in those contexts where schools, the third sector, and design professionals -sensitive to issues- are present as well as grass-routed. Naturally without forgetting the crucial support of local public bodies, which are responsible for approving public utility projects.
Thinking about products, both digital (mobile app) and analog supports (e.g. graphic posters, flyers, maps to go through the city, and outdoor totems to interact with digital contents) could be a quite easy conceptual “tool-kit” one can check to practically produce the materials at the end of a similar process, of course considering to do a specific adaptation in terms of contents and language.
On the other side, locations, characters' stories that led the paths in the city (one interact with, in the app), and specific numbers off the pathological gambling phenomena (which appear during the interactions) are highly customizable.
1\ THE ACTIVATION OF LOCAL NETWORK AND CONSENSUS - The initial concept of the game-exhibition was defined by the operators of the ITACA Cooperative together with Studio SHIFT; the contents were shared with Ats Bergamo. An active listening dialogue was open for all territorial stakeholders.
2\ THE PROCESS OF CO-CREATION - NO-GAP process was presented to local High schools invited to attend to an ad-hoc training about gambling, led by ITACA.
From theme to concept - Studio SHIFT planned and lead online sessions with students to introduce gamification rules and experiment with some design tools that allowed the elaboration of creative proposals. At the end of these meetings, the students were divided into small groups and asked to elaborate the first "project sheets": a draft idea canva including the objectives, recipients, actions, duration, and general purpose of their potential game-exhibition. It also included hypothetical targets, i.e. the representation of a character who stands for a specific age group (personas profile) to which address the gaming experience.
3\ THE PROFESSIONAL FINALIZATION OF OUTPUT
From concept to product - The students started a new journey (including technical tips) with Sfelab to implement a few selected proposals from the wider range of collected ideas. The students created a more detailed story-script, defining the stories but also game dynamics and mechanics (always thinking about the escape room format): type of puzzles to be solved, duration, and where interactive touchpoint should have been installed. They also dealt entirely with the creation of the videos to be included in the paths, from the dialogues to their construction.
In addition, Sfelab took care of creating graphics and the app to be used during the game up to executives' files and production.
The volume of money played in Italy in 2021 increased by 21% reaching a value of 111.17 billion euros, also in reaction to the closures imposed on physical gaming during Covid-19. In the last twelve months, 5% of young people played at least once a week or every day (frequent players), while 5% did so on a monthly basis. Online gaming is today the prevailing form for 1 player out of 3 (31%), with the peak of online sports betting, practiced by 42% of subjects (in the second place there is online poker with 24% and online casinos with 21%). On the other hand, the most popular game among young people is Scratch & Win, with 56% of preference, followed by sports betting in agencies (22%).
For 88% of UNDER19 players, the average weekly expenditure for games is less than 5 euros. The Nomisma study shows that 9% of players have developed problematic gambling habits in the last year, with symptoms capable of generating negative effects on the psycho-emotional sphere (anxiety, agitation, loss of control) affected relationships (family, friends, school). In addition, the 11% of young people who have played in the last 12 months are considered "at-risk players”.
Pathological gambling is not just a problem for youngsters: during 2020, 25% of OVER65s played games at least once a month (16% ). The Silver Age target mainly plays for fun or to distract from problems (35%) or for curiosity/pastime (29%). The OVER65s prefer to play in physical places - such as tobacconists, bingo halls, bars, and betting agencies - while only 3% of the elderly play online (computer, telephone, tablet).
It is no coincidence that the NO-GAP experience has used the city and commercial establishments as principal touchpoints.
The NO-GAP exhibition-game (2020-21) achieves the above-mentioned results. The feedback obtained by the community was very positive, people appreciated the initiative and asked questions to find out more about gambling.
During 2022, a second edition of the project has been tested and implemented with the title of NO-GAP school-exhibition.
With a view to community empowerment and youth protagonism, the peer educators of the high schools who took part in the previous project were once again involved: the sr. students were asked to propose and manage the new activity within their classes. The game was inspired by the contents of Marco Baldini's autobiographical book "The player", in particular focusing on the mathematical concepts connected to the "fixed loss" and other characteristics that make a game more dangerous. The player is invited to identify with 5 different characters (the father, the sister, the girlfriend, the friend, and the teacher) who aim to help the protagonist/player to get out of his addiction.
At the end of the game, the students were asked to produce some graphic or narrative material reworking what they learned during the experimentation, convincing Marco to give up gambling.
There were 50 peers involved; they made it possible to reach 30 classes for a total of about 750 students.
