Gianluca Sgueo about gamification and how it has potential to improve participation in democracies

Welcome to another episode of Democracy Innovators Podcast.

Our guest today is

Gianluca Sgueo. Thank you for

being here and for

your time. Thank you very much for

having me.

I can see from your experience

you have a lot of experience in

this field. I see

from your LinkedIn that you have

a description: digital transformation, democracy and global

affairs. But if I

go on your website,

I can see you really have

extensive experience and I honestly

don't know where to start.

So as a first question I would

like to ask you: when did you

first think that technology

could be a helpful tool

for democratic systems

and citizens?

Actually, I think I

have the kind of professional profile that

could be described as a hybrid

profile, which is not necessarily always

a good thing. Sometimes

you feel you

don't belong professionally to a specific field.

But I really think it's

my trademark - combining

different sectors. The sectors are technological

innovation, or if you prefer digital transition,

democratic participation,

and interest in representation as well,

all in a global sphere.

I'm telling you

this because my interest in technology,

academically speaking,

came later compared with my

interest in democracy. I am

a lawyer by education, so I

have a degree in law and one

in political sciences, or science of public

administration,

to be precise.

Then I enrolled in a PhD in

public and administrative law, and my PhD

thesis was about participatory mechanisms across

different legal systems: Italy,

a few European states, the European

Union,

and the United States. So I

compared how different systems

consult citizens

and engage them in policy-making.

My PhD was done between

2007

and 2010,

roughly.

So technologies were of course already there,

but if I go back and

read my thesis - actually my

thesis was published as a

book - my focus was not

on technology. Technology is there, there is

a little bit of it,

but the focus was about the globalization

of democracy. The title of the book

- it's an Italian book -

is

"Experiments with Global Democracy."

I was interested in that and

then little by little, after that period,

I realized that I

was exploring more and more the impact

of digital technology within

the mechanisms to

consult citizens. So the

balance between my interest

in democracy and my interest in technology

changed. I can say that

now I am still interested in

both, but I'm starting more from observing

the technology and how this technology is

changing the democratic sphere. So over

the years, technology has become more relevant

as an element of my analysis -

artificial intelligence, digital platforms,

and so on.

You mentioned participation, which is something that

is very interesting to me.

I think in our society

people do not really participate a lot.

I'm thinking about

gamification

as a way to help

citizens participate. I'm thinking about

gamification,

and I notice you've written a

book about this.

Correct. So yes,

I don't want to

make too many distinctions, but you know,

when you study democracy, when you

look at democracy, you at least learn

to distinguish between participatory democracy and

representative democracy. Both are

touched by the relevance of technology,

of course. But what I'm

interested in looking at is in particular

participatory democracy. I think both participatory

democracy and representative democracy - elections

in the latter case - are affected by

the same

critical elements. One

of these critical elements is the fact

that people are less engaged. People are

going to vote in lower numbers

compared with the past, and they

just aren't interested.

That applies also to how

we as citizens engage

in decision-making with administrations - what I would

call more exactly participatory democracy. This

is a very common problem. It's

something that has been acknowledged already

a few years ago. But the interesting

thing is that when digital

technology became widespread across Western

governments, there was a clear moment

in which many scholars and politicians and

practitioners

thought that this technological implementation

could be used to solve the problem

of participation. In other words, since we

now have digital tools to interact,

it will be much easier for me

to be interested

and for policymakers to listen

to what citizens have to say.

But that unfortunately did not happen. We

have plenty of very good examples -

in podcasts we hear about

a lot of very nice, what

would be called best practices. On the

other hand, I think that the problem

remains and it's even more striking.

This is because while it's true

that digital technology helps people in

principle to be in touch

without much effort, you mentioned

gamification - it's

something I've been studying for a while

and, as you said, something I've been

publishing about.

The idea is quite simple. I'll just

summarize it, and then of course if

you want to know more, we can

dig into it a little more. The idea

is that we can -

we can design - this is another word

that I really like, "design" - we can

design participatory

spaces with some game elements,

some elements that resemble a game, not

a pure game, something that resembles

a game.

Ideally - I want to

be precise - ideally this should help citizens to

be more motivated because we all like

to play. It's something that is part

of our learning experience. We as children

learn things by playing.

The use of games is something that we as

humans use for a long part of

our life in order to learn things.

There's a moment in

which we think that gaming is

trivial and is not for adults

any longer, but actually

there's a lot of game design

in many things that we do, like

in marketing strategies, for example. Now the

idea is that we could engage citizens

more by offering them gamified

environments. Now if you ask me, "Is

this working or not?"

my answer would be: it depends. It's

not the solution to the problem.

We have some very nice examples to

tell, but on the other hand we

have many examples that don't work.

So we have very good examples

of best practices. So what is

missing?

Is this related to

how institutions work? Why are

the solutions not implemented or tested

more widely?

That's an excellent question because it's actually

the picture of the problem. As you said,

we have many examples. When

I

published my book and also occasionally when

I write on the topic, it's

always nice to have a list of

examples - there are plenty of those

at all levels, from the very

local level to the national level, even

some supranational

examples that work very well.

In order to answer your question, I

need to make a step back to

how game design works, in order to

then give a possible explanation of

why gamification didn't work

so far in participatory experiments.

Game design basically replicates

elements of a game within participatory processes,

which means that you have basically three elements:

you have a set of rules, you have a

competition -

the competition

could be against other people

or could be against yourself,

it doesn't really matter - and third,

you have a reward. Again, don't

think necessarily about money or something tangible -

it can be anything like passing to another

level or being acknowledged

to have succeeded in something. So the

reward is, let's say, the conclusion

of your journey and maybe the

beginning of a new step.

Now all these elements, if well-combined,

well-designed within participatory processes, as

we said, could work very well.

What is the problem? It's another concept

that is very familiar to all those

who study gaming or

video gaming, and this is called the

"curve of engagement."

It really looks like a curve, and

I'd like you to think of

any game you might have played over

the last few years - could be anything

from something very simple on a

mobile phone, or maybe you're

into video gaming, or anything that is

related to console gaming,

or a board game.

You see that

we have this curve that goes up

because if the game is well-designed,

it looks interesting, it looks fascinating. We

want to spend more time with it.

The

complexity of the game is

well-balanced, so we see that

if we play, maybe we fail,

but we can improve, and so next

time we will defeat, for example, the

boss of the level, and we

scale up to the next level. So

it's

actually increasing. And then there

is a moment - sooner or later,

even with the best possible game - there

is a moment in which either you

feel that it's too complicated, or you

don't have time to play

that game in order to progress,

or instead you

become so good that it's a little boring.

So the curve starts to descend

and you are less engaged.

This is in pure gaming,

okay? But the same mechanism, as I

said, could be applied

to participatory processes.

So you have obviously a

set of rules, but you

can have incentives, and you have a

sort of competition between participants, and you

have a sort of reward.

That's the problem: it is not

meant to last for too long. You

have to reinvent the system in order

to re-engage the participants. You don't

have a single solution that will work

forever. There is no

video game - even Super Mario. Super

Mario - I think everybody has played Super Mario. After

more than thirty years, we still have

new versions of Super Mario, and the concept

is similar. I still enjoy going

back to Super Mario and playing it a

little bit, but

even Super Mario, the classic, has a curve.

After a while, it's too complex,

or it's too easy,

or I'm changing. So the same

applies to game design in participatory processes.

That explains why

we have a lot of single-shot

great examples. Some of them last

a little longer, but nothing that we

could say, "Okay, this is the benchmark -

this is how you design gaming into

democratic participation because it returns great

results." There's nothing like that. The

reason is that, as in any

other game, people - participants in this case -

need to be stimulated in different

ways.

I'm thinking about forms of

communication. Can we think about

the school system as a sort of

gamification? Because it

has a set of rules, it has

some sort of competition, and

also some kind of rewards. Also,

can we think about

gamification in terms of

collaboration instead of

competition?

I think - I will answer

your second remark first - I think

you can cooperate, you can collaborate in

order to achieve something, and that is

a sort of competition.

The concept of competition has to

be understood in a very broad way, so

it doesn't necessarily mean me against you

or me and you against X and

Z or something like that. It could

be something like that, but could also

be me and you - we have to

cooperate

in order to achieve a certain result.

I'm going to give

you an example. There is

a very nice experiment that was done

a few years ago by a municipality

in the United States. The idea of

the municipality was: we are expanding over

the years, and so

the social bonds have been weakening.

We want our local population -

we still have a small municipality

but growing in numbers - and

so we want to try to have

social bonds reestablished between different communities that

are living in the same area.

So they basically created this

virtual currency - it was called "Mason Money"

(I don't remember in which state of the

United States it was,

but the name of the city was Mason or Macon).

They basically created this virtual currency

and they distributed tasks

among citizens that would participate in this

sort of competition in order to find

the other half of the currency

and create a social bond.

So you see, in this case there

was a clear cooperation aim, but there

was a competition as well.

So absolutely, you can cooperate, and that

could also be a sort of competition

against yourself in order to achieve

another level. It also resembles education

or schooling systems in a way.

There are a lot of theories that

suggest having gamification used

as a learning system. Actually, many

of the platforms that provide

online learning are based on

gamification dynamics.

You can think about a very

famous platform - the

one that is meant to teach

languages -

or you can also go on very

big platforms like Coursera,

in which you basically access

learning in different subjects. All of them

are based on

very clear gamification dynamics, so you

have progress, you are awarded

points or stars or levels, whatever

it is, and you progress. You

achieve credits - it's a

very simple metric that can work very

well

in education.

Do you have any other examples

of

gamification to share?

Yeah, sure. There are many, many of

those. One very interesting example which

has a story behind it that's

worth knowing is the

story of "Evoke,"

which was created by the World Bank.

So we're talking about a very important

international institution. For those who don't

know, the World Bank

is an international institution that was created

after the Bretton Woods

agreements in order to - not

regulate global finance, but actually in order to loan money

to countries that would get this money

and in exchange would apply

democratic reforms. That is still the

role of the World Bank, and also

the International

Monetary Fund, which is the sister

organization

that was also created in the

same period.

If you go on

the website of the World Bank, it's

an incredible source of information. They have

very highly profiled professionals that are producing

very interesting datasets, for example, about

a lot of topics - really a lot

of topics. It's very broad,

and it's truly

an incredible source of information.

A few years ago -

and all this information is

actually available for free, it's

just there, you go online and you

can download the papers and

the reports - there are plenty of

those - the

World Bank did a sort

of internal investigation. The aim

was to

see what was the reaction by the

general public. So what would people

take from all this material?

The result - I don't remember the exact

numbers, but the result was striking -

just a very tiny percent of the

total amount of documents that were published

by the World Bank - when I say

tiny, I mean like one or

two percent, something like that - had been

downloaded at least once.

And part of these downloads was

done by people working at the World

Bank. So what was the result? We

have this incredible amount of information which

nobody

knows, nobody uses, and people,

in the best-case scenario, think

that we are technocrats that are

imposing draconian measures on national

economies. That was the

perception of people who knew

something - actually, who didn't know much about the

World Bank.

So the institution tried

to create something, an initiative that

could bring people into knowing

the institution, and they created this e-book called "Evoke."

It was a sort of

board game that was played globally,

and every week you would have

a mission. This mission

consisted of different tasks. The idea was:

the world is on the verge

of a global crisis, a very hard global

crisis, and

we have to intervene by doing something.

What should we do? Famine,

disruption of chains of production, this kind

of stuff. So people would

engage in different tasks on a weekly

basis. They would go through a process

that obviously was meant to teach people

what the World Bank does, because these

are typical tasks

that people at the World Bank

handle in their daily job.

The final task - the so-called

"education" - was to find an original idea

to be possibly implemented by the

World Bank, and the

best

idea would be called to Washington, D.C.,

where the World Bank headquarters is located,

and be awarded a cash

prize - I think in that case it was

a small amount.

Obviously, the World

Bank doesn't need

just people suggesting ideas - that

was part of the

game design, but it wasn't the main goal.

The main goal was to have as

many people as possible sharing information, learning

about the World Bank, sharing information with

other

participants, and increasing interest in the

institution. The results -

and this is something that I discuss in

a few publications in which I described

this example -

one possible question is: okay, so how

many people participated? Was it something

that attracted hundreds of thousands of

participants? No.

I think the total number of participants

was in the thousands

globally, so you realize it's quite

a tiny number. But the question that

I think is important to ask is

not just how many, but how engaged

these people were.

If you look at the pure volume,

again, you don't have

an incredible response by citizens. But

if you look at the interest of

these people, you might have a different

result. So you

could see that these people were actually

quite engaged in

the experiment, so it was in that

sense quite successful.

I was wondering why people act

a certain way. It's a

very hard question.

What do you mean exactly?

Can you help me understand better?

Yeah, I was thinking because

you said that actually the datasets

were downloaded by just a very small amount

of people.

And when there was the sort

of economic incentive,

then not so many people, but

still

a good amount of people

explored this kind of data.

So I think about the economic

incentive, but I'm also thinking about

why, without the economic incentive,

people

do not look for something that

actually could be very interesting. I

mean, maybe people read books about

topics and they could

obtain the same information, maybe in

a different way.

Absolutely.

I get your question, and

it brings us back to the

reason for gamification, which is one possible

solution,

and also brings us back to

your first question about

technology and what is

the reason why technology is now so

interesting to analyze for someone who

has an interest in democracy as a

possible solution,

but also as a crisis.

The principle is that

for many people,

participating

in democratic processes is not

perceived as a solution any longer.

So if you look at civic

engagement in all its forms - the

electoral participation,

engaging in

charity, for example, donating money

for a civic cause, or any other

activity that we would

consider part of democratic civic life -

if you look at what our parents

and grandparents - I'm talking about the

seventies, the sixties, and before -

were doing compared with what

people do now, you would probably agree

with saying that civic

capital has been shrinking over time, so that

people are spending less time in

civic activities. We said it before -

fewer people go to vote. If you look at,

for example - let's take a country

like Italy - it depends on the country,

of course, but in a country

like Italy,

in the seventies there

were millions of Italians who had

a

subscription to a political party, and

now political parties have very low numbers

of people. It's very tiny - it's

like seventy percent less than

twenty or thirty years ago.

So the principle is: it's not appealing

anymore, for a lot

of reasons related to the

crisis of democracy - the lack of social mobility,

the fact that we feel there are

fewer opportunities, and also the fact

that digital platforms have

captured

much of the attention of people. All these

reasons are contributing.

Now we go to game design. You mentioned the

financial incentive. Let me say that it's

not necessarily a financial incentive - that

is one possibility. It

can work very well, but it

can also be something completely unrelated

to giving you money. It could be having

your name mentioned in the first

place of a ranking. I'm going to give you an

example in a second - it's another

very interesting example.

But before that,

that's the potential of game design.

The potential is: what if I give

you a framework that will make the

experience more appealing? So it's not just

the fact that we will win, I don't know, ten euros,

but also the fact

that maybe we could spend one hour

together

thinking about how to solve a

problem, and maybe you have a resource,

I have a contact, and maybe we

can get closer to that result,

and we can do that in an

engaging way - maybe,

at least in the short term. Let's remember

the short-termism of these kinds

of

experiments, but maybe in the short term this

results in some interest.

In other words, people need to be stimulated

in order to find interesting a participatory

experiment. I'm not - this is not

original - I'm just quoting the very

basic

idea of behavioral sciences, all the

theory of nudging. You know, Richard

Thaler or Cass Sunstein - all

these theories are precisely that you can

create a framework in which you

push people, you give a sort of nudge

to people in order to find more interesting

an experience.

And if you allow me, I'm

going to mention another very interesting

case which did not include a

financial incentive. It was gamified

and resulted in a very

interesting outcome.

Now we are in Latin

America, more precisely in the capital city of

Peru - Lima - which was

at least one of the most polluted cities

in the world. One of the

reasons for this pollution

was the fact that the city is

very large and it has a number

of places where people just throw

their garbage, and these places are not controlled.

So as you can imagine, this

contributes to air pollution and environmental problems,

causing a lot of troubles. But

the municipality didn't have the resources

to make more controls, to hire people

that would control how

the garbage was

treated by the population.

So what the municipality decided to do was

to create this participatory experiment, and

they called it "Gallinazo Avisa,"

which means "the vultures are

checking." They trained -

I think it was ten vultures,

this animal that lives

in that area of the world -

in order to spot

this garbage. So they enjoy finding places where they

can find food, and they

put a GoPro camera on the bodies

of these vultures.

So when they fly, they actually

record the area, and then

what the municipality does is

take these videos and upload them on a

website and ask the citizens: "Can you

help us watch these videos? We don't

have the capacity, but if you can

help us - it's hours and hours

of footage - and you can spot

illegal sites within the city, you

can actually tell us and we will

at least try to intervene."

It was a huge success, and the reward was that

the names of those who had spent

hours watching these videos were mentioned

on the official website.

It was so successful that at a

certain point, there were citizens who were

taking videos with their mobile phones and

they were sending them to the municipality

to say, "This is also where you

should intervene."

Again,

an example - in this case, no money

even - but the fact that

watching very boring two or

three hours of footage of

an aerial vision of the city

resulted in something helpful for the municipality

that could intervene on

illegal sites.

I'm thinking about this crisis of

democracy and why people do not feel

that participating

is a solution.

I think about how information

is power in two different ways,

because on one hand, there are

social media, and as you

say, the attention of people is

captured by

social media. And at the same

time, also, information is power because

if there's something

wrong in my town, in the place

where I live, and I know that

I can send an email to

the mayor or someone in

the administration of the town,

I can

actually do something and change

the place where I live.

Before I thought about

why people are

not participating - because

they have more distractions, yes, as you

said, social media -

but it's not

related to time...

No, it probably is another problem.

The intangible assets that you need in order

to participate could make the difference between

types of participants. Let me explain myself.

Time is an intangible asset, so let's

say in your life there are

moments in which you feel you have

more time and moments

in which you feel your time is

limited.

Typically when you are younger and

you are in your school age,

you feel you have plenty of

time to dedicate yourself

to whatever you like. And then maybe

you grow up, have a family,

work, and so most of your

time is used in commitments,

and

the feeling of available time

is low.

But in order to participate, you need

some time, as you said. For

example, I need to

have the time to connect online

and listen to the meeting and maybe

make interventions, share what I want,

and then I have to follow

up. That can discriminate between certain

types of participants. That's why -

and

that's another reason why - in participatory

experiments online, we typically have certain categories

that are more represented than others.

These categories that are overrepresented are people aged over

fifty-five or even sixty-five,

for a clear reason: that is the

age of your life in which you

return to have more free time for

yourself.

It's also possible that you are more

civically engaged - you start feeling the need

to give a contribution or to

think about future generations. There are

many reasons, but one reason is also

that you have more time than you

used to have ten years before.

And also men compared with women,

because unfortunately in many social systems, it's

the woman who is taking care of

the family. So you can imagine,

if you're a mother, you have to

take care of the babies and

the family - you don't have

the time to do this.

Then there are other categories. So

the reason of time, I think, is

relevant. It is an explanation - not of

why people don't participate, or at least

it's a partial explanation of why people

don't participate - but more of the

fact that there are certain participants

that are overrepresented

and other participants that are

underrepresented. But in general, I think

that the lack of participation is explainable

by a missing link between what am

I achieving by participating

and what is the effort

that I need to take in order

to participate. It's never a pure

trade-off, right? It's never like "I pay

a ticket, then I watch a movie" -

it's not like that. But it's also

true that if I have a feeling

that even if I am contributing,

it's not really changing anything, I will

probably lose interest, and my interest

is also attracted by other stuff.

There's always a chance to do something

engaging by watching a movie or surfing

the web or playing a video

game or stuff like that.

So what do we have to

fix in order to

have better democracy? I

think about your book that in

Italian is "La Democrazia Similare,"

and in English, I don't know -

"Best Democracy Maybe"?

The subtitle is also important because

it says "the technologies that are changing power,"

so we return to

the original point.

Obviously, I don't have

the recipe for solving the problems of

democracy. I think it's part of the

debate - people, scholars, practitioners, politicians are

debating the crisis of democracy and the

many possible solutions.

A word that I'm really interested in -

it's not in the title, I mean it's

in the book, not in the title -

but the word that I'm really focused on

and that I think is key is the word

"design," which I mentioned at the beginning.

I think it's nice to mention:

how do we want to design our digital interactions?

This solution implies as a

precondition the fact that we accept that

most of the democratic

participation will be happening

on digital platforms, right?

And how do

we want to design these platforms?

I think there are a number of elements

that could help citizens to

engage a little more. One is the

topic we've been discussing for

most part of this interview: making the

participation more entertaining, so including elements that

can engage people. Obviously, game

design is the main

idea, but it's not the only one.

The other one is: how do we

narrate the

participatory process? I think that a

good storytelling of the participatory process is

very important.

I think even if I don't

believe it was a successful case, the

Conference on the Future of Europe -

I think that the storytelling behind it was quite

powerful. The idea was: "I'm giving you,

European citizen, the possibility to tell me,

you policymaker, what is the future of

Europe that you

want to imagine? What Europe would you like

to live in ten years from now?"

It was very well constructed, it was

powerful. It was designed before the pandemic, but it actually

came during the pandemic, so it was

a moment in which we were all

in a way questioning

these ideas of "okay, what's going to

happen next? How will the world

be changing after this?" So it

was a very nice storytelling.

And the third element, which is probably the most

important, is this:

the narration of democracy should retake on board

the concept of complexity.

I'm giving you a one-minute

explanation, which is something I've been researching

and writing about for quite a long

time now.

The design of commercial technology is

based on very simple elements: one is

simplicity, another one is the speed

of service, and the third one is

the

tailored nature of the services. So we

have very simple-to-use

digital devices, we have devices that are

trying to sell us

the idea of very fast service, and

that are also tailored to your needs.

Now, all these elements are what we

expect when we engage digitally with anything.

But in democratic participation, this

is not possible.

Decision-making takes time, it implies

a high level of conflict - at

least one part or one opinion - and

it is time-consuming, going back to

time. So a good way to have

people

at least aware and not disappointed by

what participatory processes online in digital formats

would imply is to bring back the

concept of complexity - not selling the

idea that by clicking (which was

very

popular when digitalization came into democracy) you

just click and you are

participating in democracy. Because that type of

narration created the disappointed citizens that we

are dealing with right now - people that

don't see any actual change when they

actually see

the results of participation.

I have a couple more questions if you have some more time.

Sure. So how do you imagine our social

or political system in twenty or

fifty years? I know it's very

difficult to reply, but do you

have any idea about some

possibilities?

Well, I'm very interested

and really fascinated by

futures studies. It's a very interesting

field of debate. At this very

moment, I'm reading a book on

the history of future thinking - so how

thinking about the future has changed over the

years.

It went through different

stages, and today we actually have

a science for that. We have foresight,

which is the scientific approach to

thinking strategically about the future - so quite

an interesting element.

So I believe that we will have

to face

a situation in which

we will probably have more time for

ourselves, and this more time will be

the result of the use of technology.

I know that what I just said

has a lot of exceptions and it's

probably very Western-focused. I know that

it's not a global way of

thinking, so I'm now looking more at

the situation with which I'm more familiar -

the Western world.

In the Western world, technology

will give us more time to do

things. Think about artificial intelligence and how

quickly you can

have certain results compared

with the past. What will

we make of this extra time? That is quite a

problem that we need to think about,

and I'm not just talking about the

labor-related aspects. I'm also thinking of

what do you do when you start

thinking of a society in which not

all of your time is spent

working in an office or

in a factory, which is the model

we've been part of over the last

fifty years.

So the last fifty years,

the broad idea is that once you

finish studying, you enter work,

and most of your life

will be spent - you do

a lot of stuff, but most of

the time you are at work. What

happens when you don't have that necessity

any longer?

That will have very interesting democratic

implications. It's not exactly a description

of the future world that I imagine,

but I think it's one crucial challenge

that we will have in the not-so-

far future.

The gain of time - a very bad use of

this gain of time is to be

more engaged in trivial uses

of our digital tools - scrolling and

watching ephemeral content.

That would be a very bad way

of using it.

A better way could be

re-engaging in social spaces,

and that's why I describe it

as a challenge.

I haven't asked anything about

you yet. I mean, just about your

professional

background. So I would like to

ask you if you want to share

something related to when you

were a child, where did you grow

up, what were your interests?

Sure, absolutely. I think I am

the typical

middle-class man. I was

born in a typical middle-class family,

and I am very aware of

not using the word "normal" because there is

a very interesting book about this - the

word "normal" has very different meanings

wherever you are, so it's very

misleading what is normal, what is normality.

In Italy, I was

born in 1976, so at the

end of the seventies. Let's say

I was a child in the eighties,

and it was in Rome,

the capital city. Both my

parents were working in

the private sector, and I have

a brother. So I would describe myself

as quite an ordinary middle-class family

living in a big city.

If I have to

remember some facts from my

childhood, I think books were an

important part of it, and I was -

this is something I'm doing with

my daughters now - I was

taught to like books. My house was full

of books, and I remember

there was a moment - summertime

when you have a lot of time

and you're bored because you didn't know

what to do - and I started to

enjoy taking a book and reading it.

That was an enjoyment

that I remember very well, and I

also remember that my mother -

both my parents, but my father was working

full-time, my mother was working part-time -

so my afternoons were with my mother

and my brother.

They were very strict

with the use of television. In

my generation, the distraction was TV -

we didn't have digital mobile phones,

of course, or stuff like that.

We would watch one hour - we could

choose one hour to watch TV

in the afternoon. There was a

very popular TV show

back then,

which was cartoons and a little entertainment,

and once that was finished, we had

to turn off the TV and do

something else. We were lucky because despite

living in a big city, we

were living in a building which had

some internal gardens, so when the

weather was nice, we

would go out and play with

other kids and sing songs,

or we would engage in reading

or drawing stuff. And again, this is something that I'm

also doing with my daughters right now -

they have a little time

they can use digital devices. I'm

not prohibiting them

from using digital tools - they are still

young -

but only for a

limited time. The rest of the time

they have to do something else.

That was a very important

part of my education. I am not

saying that I'm fully safe from

digital dependencies - in the sense that, like

many of us, I am attached to my

mobile phone and I sometimes feel

phantom vibration syndrome

when I

don't have reliable signal. I'm not saying

that this saved me from

being affected by digital tools, but it gave

me some elements to

train my brain, and I still like

to read books in paper format,

for example.

This is what I remember from my

childhood - it was a very

quiet childhood.

One last thing - it's something

I am passionate about:

I am very passionate about fantasy.

I still play

Dungeons & Dragons - it's

something that I really love. So

everything that's related with Lord

of the Rings, dragons,

fantasy - in movies,

in games, or in board games - it's

something that I still enjoy

doing. And that also came from

when I was thirteen.

So I was thinking about Dungeons &

Dragons in relation to gamification,

and maybe...

Exactly! That's true. I was

a dungeon master - I was

the one who was telling the story

to the others.

Do you have any books that

you were passionate about when you were a kid?

Yeah, okay. I have a couple of books that I

really remember.

One is a classic - I think when

I turned ten,

a friend of mine gave me

a present: The Hobbit from Tolkien.

I remember

I didn't read the book immediately. I

probably thought it was not interesting, so

I didn't read it right after that. Maybe

one or two years later,

I went back to

that book and it was mind-blowing.

It was precisely the type of

story that I like:

elves, dwarves,

the hobbit, the dragon - the

classic.

And then obviously The Lord of the

Rings came later.

So that's one - I would

say everything that Tolkien has produced, but

if I had to pick one book,

I would say The Hobbit.

The other one is The Lord

of the Flies, which is a

book which I read by chance. I

think maybe it was in the

house of my uncle where I would

spend the summertime,

and I

really enjoyed the

dark side of the book. For

those who - I hope you've read

it, it's another classic - you

see how human dynamics work,

and even with children, how the

power balances are established to the point

that things fall

out of control with these

young people. So that was

also something that I really remember.

I enjoyed it and

I thought it was a very nice reading.

I also love The Lord

of the Rings, but I

have to read The Lord

of the Flies.

I would do - let me

recommend it.

It's a very, very nice

book. It's a narration of

human society, basically. The story

looks like a children's story, but it's

not. It's really worth it. Actually,

there are some movie adaptations - they're quite old -

but I would suggest reading the book.

Thank you. And the last question:

for people that are working in the field

and are searching and experimenting

with new solutions in relation to participation...

What I would like to see more -

let's put it this way - I would

like to see more cross-pollination

of different disciplines.

To a certain extent, we have it, however I

still see there are

a little bit of silos

between people working in the field.

For

example, Europeanists are very engaged in participation -

it's really part of

people studying European landscapes - but

these people do not talk much with,

for example, European policymakers, or at least with people

interested in supranational governance.

On the same side, people looking at

global dynamics tend to ignore or consider

less relevant what is happening

in certain fields.

Lawyers, political scientists,

sociologists - they don't know

designers.

So it's now more frequent

to find this type of cross-pollination. I am,

for example, contributing to a

project in which we have

lawyers, political science scientists like

me, but also designers. So we

try to compare different perspectives,

and I think that it would be

nice to have more of that -

more, because sometimes you feel

you're not talking the same language, and

obviously you see the world from different

angles. But it's actually when you

find a common point, it's a very

strong one, because it means

it's been found from different perspectives,

and so it's more difficult to achieve,

but it's also more rewarding to achieve.

Thank you very much. It was very

nice to be part of

this podcast. I look forward to

your next episodes, and

now that I'm a subscriber to the podcast,

I'll be following the

new episodes every time you

publish them.

Really, really thank you.