Gameful Green: A Systematic Review on the Use of Serious Computer Games and Gamified Mobile Apps to Foster Pro-Environmental Information, Attitudes and Behaviors (original) (raw)
Related papers
Energy Research & Social Science, 2017
Serious games and gamification to engage consumers in pro-environmental behaviours for energy efficiency are in their infancy. To date, despite growing interest and some initial attempts, their potential to engage consumers in energy efficiency behaviours has been understudied. To provide an overview of serious games and gamification to engage individuals in pro-environmental behaviours for energy efficiency, a computer-based search for relevant publications was performed in several databases. After applying the inclusion criteria and removing duplicates, 10 papers were included in this systematic review. Results showed that serious games and gamification have been used in three different areas related to energy efficiency: environmental education, consumption awareness, and pro-environmental behaviours. This review also showed that applied gaming interventions can be used in more than one of these three areas (comprehensive interventions). The main observation to be drawn from this review is that both serious games and gamification can foster energy-saving behaviours and vary widely in terms of type of games and of features that might be appealing and motivating.
ECO ECO: Changing Climate Related Behaviors For Cellphone-Based Videogames
Global climate change has become a major issue of today's human society. Since most of our human activity could potentially have big environmental impacts once accumulated, it is especially important that the public is educated with the environmental effects of their daily actions. This paper's main purpose is to propose a gamified system that leverages the high saturation of smartphones and the rising popularity of Internet of Things (IoT) to educate young children with environmental concepts as well as encouraging them to commit to real-life "green habits". An android mobile game Eco Eco was developed to demonstrate the concept and test the proposed system's effectiveness for young users. This Farmville-like game is played only by conducting real-life environmental activities like using a reusable water bottle, walking more steps instead of using cars, or reduce usage of household electricity. The game, developed with Unity3D utilizes the Google Fit API for step count, CloudSight API for image recognition and a connected smart device for monitoring energy usage. A preliminary user test was also conducted to improve the usability of the system as well as to test the effects of this system.
2013 IAIA13_Gamification of environmental impacts in digital media
Social norms affect people"s attitudes, intentions, and behaviors. Thus, creating green awareness, in particular conveying the concept of environmental impacts to young generations through educational programs, is crucial to the success of the ultimate sustainable development. As sustainability is an abstract concept describing human interactions with complex ecological and climate systems, it is important to let our next generations appraise the consequences of environmental impacts and to nurture them to behave in a way with minimal environmental impacts. This paper presents some of the "green" initiatives that are implemented in Hong Kong. The aim of these initiatives is to provide simple models of complex systems, deployed in digital media making use of cloud technologies, online interactive games, and competition to raise green awareness among high school students. The results indicate that, with enough support and freedom, students can come up with their own green ideas rather than passively rely on what they have learned from textbooks.
Raising Awareness for Environmental Issues through Mobile Device Based Serious Games
dai-labor.de
We investigate the design of computer games for mobile phones to raise awareness for environmental issues through targeting the attitude people have towards them. Focusing on peoples attitude when investigating their behaviour is an established approach [1] in behavioural psychology. Recent studies claim that the repeated playing of (computer) games can influence the players behaviour . Computer games have the potential to achieve controlled behavioural chance and we investigate a formal basis [3] and identify the requirements [4, 5] for this. We present a prototype for mobile phones.
Sustainability
Education is a key factor to respond to the threat of climate change, increasing not only knowledge but also encouraging changes in attitudes and behaviors to adopt sustainable lifestyles. Scholars and practitioners in the field of education call for innovative ways of engaging youth—a reason why gamification has gained more attention in recent years. This paper aims at exploring the role of gamification in affecting pro-environmental behavioral change and searching for best practices for educational purposes. For that aim, pro-environmental gamification platforms are identified and analyzed by applying two different frameworks: the Octalysis Framework and the Climate Change Engagement through Games Framework. After scanning 181 cases, a final sample of six is analyzed and two of them are selected as best practices with higher potential to engage users in pro-environmental behavioral change: SaveOhno and JouleBug. Meaning, ownership, and social influence, as well as achievability, c...
A Gamified Platform to Encourage Sustainable Behaviours
AGILE: GIScience series, 2024
The production, use, and disposal of goods and services require the use of natural resources, resulting in waste and environmental pollution. A growing number of people are embracing more sustainable lifestyles in alignment with the 3Rs (Reducing, Reusing, and Recycling) to counter these effects, but many remain uninformed of their options, or lack the motivation to adopt these practices. The work described in this paper addresses these issues through the development of the Sustainable App, a mobile application incorporating techniques of persuasion and gamification which offers its users eco-friendly alternatives to several types of daily activities, made available via an interactive map. The app employs diverse strategies to improve engagement, including a pet-nurturing game-like feature that responds to user actions related to sustainable transport choices, sustainable retail, and recycling. Additionally, the complete platform associated with the app also delivers Just-In-Time (JIT) messages concerning nearby sustainable choices based on location and time. Upon evaluation of the platform, positive user experience and overall good feedback were noted. Experts also weighed in on the application's evaluation, offering valuable insights to refine future iterations.
CLIMATO: CLIMATE CHANGE AWARENESS GAME FOR PROMOTING ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION AND BEHAVIOR
International Journal of Applied Engineering & Technology, 2023
Climate change is one of the most significant global challenges that require collective efforts to mitigate its adverse impacts on the environment and human lives. One way to increase public awareness and promote environmental education is through gamification. This study aims to examine the effectiveness of climate change awareness games in promoting environmental education and behavior. The study employed a systematic review of literature to analyze the current state of research on climate change awareness games. The findings suggest that climate change awareness games are effective tools in promoting environmental education and behavior, as they enhance the players' knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors towards climate change. Additionally, the study identifies the key features of effective climate change awareness games, including immersive gameplay, interactive features, and accurate scientific information. Therefore, the study recommends the development of more climate change awareness games that incorporate these features to promote environmental education and behavior effectively.
Professor Tanda: greener gaming & pervasive play (persuasive computing, Environmental, Eco, Green)
DUX '07 Proceedings of the 2007 conference on Designing for User eXperiences, 2007
This study examines the development of a mobile phone-based pervasive game that related its user's environmental footprint. It discusses the design challenges, development and evaluation of the prototype game in order to identify the key strategies and mechanisms that relate to the production of pervasive systems for mass participation. Designing the user experience for such systems is particularly difficult, as the game had to educate and entertain without patronizing or preaching to the user. A prototype system was developed and trialed in order to identify and understand how users related to the experience and how the game may be further developed. We found that character-led tailored physical activities were generally found to be the most enjoyable, while players wanted more interaction with each other and more score-based content. Creating interdependent question sets and orchestrating the game arduous process. In the future a fully automated system will be key to its use.
Evaluating the Effectiveness of an Augmented Reality Game Promoting Environmental Action
Sustainability, 2021
While public awareness of climate change has grown over the years, many people still have misconceptions regarding effective individual environmental action. In this paper, we present a serious game called PEAR, developed using elements of geolocation and augmented reality (AR), aimed at increasing players’ awareness of climate change issues and propensity for effective sustainable behaviours. We conducted a study with participants who played the game, gauging their knowledge of and attitudes towards climate change issues before and after playing the game. Our results show that the game significantly improved participants’ knowledge on sustainability and climate-change-related issues, and that it also significantly improved their attitudes towards these topics, thus proving that serious games have the potential to impart knowledge and promote sustainable behaviours. Additionally, our results address the lack of empirical studies on the knowledge base of serious sustainability games by introducing methods of quantitatively analysing the effects of serious sustainability games while additionally providing more knowledge about the effectiveness of the specific design elements of our game.
TechTrends
Environmental sustainability education should create eco-awareness and produce pro-environmental behaviors. Traditional instructional methods create eco-awareness but do not make people act. Purposefully designed digital games for attitudinal instruction provide cognitive knowledge, engage learners emotionally by showing the consequences of harmful behaviors, and encourage correct behaviors. Most studies involving games in different subjects showed that knowledge acquisition was greater in collaborative learning than individual game play. However, a similar comparison with respect to attitudinal learning involving a socio-scientific topic has not been conducted before. This mixed methods study conducted in a high school in India, examined the attitudinal learning among students who played a game individually (n = 45) and collaboratively (n = 44). Also, differences between students who played the game and a control group (n = 42) was examined. Surveys based on the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) and the Attitudinal Learning Instrument (ALI), showed that attitudinal learning from games was similar for collaborative and individual players. Also, attitudinal learning from games was higher compared to traditional instructional methods. Interviews explained the learning experiences of game players and how it produced pro-environmental behaviors.