A Gamified Framework for Conflict-Driven Design: Discovering Strategies for Collaborative Resilience with Multi-Agent Learning

Jin Gao

Conflicting stakeholder objectives make it difficult to coordinate investments in urban resilience. We model conflict-driven urban design as a non-zero-sum digital board game in which stakeholder agents allocate scarce resources and balance individual payoffs against shared urban development and resilience objectives. We use multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) to train policies and examine their behavior across three settings. On a 4 x 4 board, learned policies reach about 84% of the total return found by a simulated annealing benchmark. On an 8 x 8 board with spatial and resource constraints, trained agents favor projects that improve resilience in self-play. In a 12 x 12 simulation initialized from historical maps of Tatsumi, Tokyo, trained agents achieve a mean total score of 452.1, compared with 357.3 for a random-policy baseline across 10,000 simulation runs. Gains in adaptability, sustainability, flood resistance, and greenery come with reductions in vitality and density. A human-in-the-loop interface supports replay and lets participants take over stakeholder decisions, providing a testbed for exploring these trade-offs in participatory urban planning.