Digital Gaming in a Time of Climate Change (original) (raw)
Analysis of Online Climate Change Games: Exploring Opportunities
Online games have been proposed as a promising tool for communication and education. Taking into account the new communicative paradigm of young people and the fact that climate change is one of the main threats to their future, this paper presents a checklist of indicators validated using the Delphi method to analyze the communicative elements of online climate change games targeting young people, and illustrates their use and usefulness with a qualitative analysis of a sample of games produced in Spain. This exploratory study maintains that online climate change games are shaping up to be innovative strategies, thanks to their immersive narrative and interactivity, among other features, which are used to meet the communicative and educational challenges regarding climate change: causes are made visible, actions are portrayed as local, uncertainty is avoided, contextualized information is provided in a positive and proactive tone, and a critical thinking approach is encouraged through decision-making.
Toward a New Games Movement for the Digital Age
2009
This paper suggests a revisitation of the New Games Movement, formed by Stewart Brand and others in the early 1970s in the United States as a response to the Vietnam War, against a backdrop of dramatic social and economic change, fueled by a looming energy crisis, civil rights, feminism, and unhealthy widespread drug abuse. Like-minded contemporaries, R. Buckminster Fuller (World Game), Robert Smithson (Spiral Jetty), and Christo and Jean-Claude (Valley Curtain), responded in kind to these environmental and sociopolitical quandaries with their "earthworks." As digital game designers and theorists embark upon developing new methods to address the creative crisis in mainstream game production, against a similar backdrop of climate change, a controversial war, political upheaval and complex gender issues, we propose a reexamination of the New Games Movement and its methods as a means of constructing shared contexts for meaningful play in virtual and real-world spaces.
Sustainability
Serious gaming has gained increasing prominence in climate change communication, and provides opportunity to engage new audiences and new platforms for knowledge co-creation and dialogues. This paper presents the design and evaluation of a serious game on climate adaptation, primarily targeted towards high school students, practitioners and politicians. The game aims to provide an experience of the impact of climate adaptation measures, and illustrates links with selected Agenda 2030 goals, which the player has to consider, while limiting impacts of hazardous climate events. The game design builds on the key goals in Education for Sustainable Development combining comprehensive views, action competence, learner engagement and pluralism. This study draws on game sessions and surveys with high school students in Sweden, and aims to assess to what extent different aspects of the game can support an increased understanding of the needs and benefits of adaptation actions. The results of ...
Game-based Climate Change Engagement: Analyzing the Potential of Entertainment and Serious Games
Proceedings of the ACM on Human Computer Interaction, 2021
Video games have risen as a popular medium with the potential to become a powerful tool for public climate change engagement. However, little is known about how existing digital games can fulfill this role. This study systematically compiles 150 video games that represent climate change, including serious (n = 109) and for entertainment (n = 41). The games are analyzed by adapting an existing framework (15 dimensions: achievable, challenging, concrete, credible, efficacy-enhancing, experiential learning, feedback-oriented, fun, identitydriven, levelling-up, meaningful, narrative-driven, reward-driven, simulating, social) and statistically compared. The analysis reveals that most games comply with most recommended attributes, but credibility, achievability, meaningfulness, and social features are uncommon or rare. Statistical results comparing serious games and games for entertainment associate six attributes with serious games (achievable, challenging, credible, efficacyenhancing, experiential learning, feedback-oriented), and one (narrative-driven) with games for entertainment. The findings suggest that researchers would benefit from widening their lens to detect previously overlooked opportunities for game-based climate change engagement, communication, and education. The study also provides a systematic mapping of extant games depicting climate change for interested developers, designers and educators.
Videogame Visions of Post-Climate Change Futures
In this paper I describe my current research into videogame depictions of the future, and those that engage substantially with anthropogenic climate change, building upon an understanding of the role played by visions of the apocalypse as an outlet for expressions of popular fears and anxieties. The paper looks at games that have been released in the recent period, which has seen a rise in corporately funded campaigns undermining popular and scientific consensus on climate change, discussing three games in detail and the climate future they present; Anno 2070 (2011) which depicts a flooded earth; Fate of the World (2011) which presents a player with the supreme difficulty of balancing development goals with a finite carbon budget; and ARMA 3 (2013), which deploys visual depictions of renewable energy power generation (windmills, tidal power, solar arrays) to evoke a sense of futurity and in the process projects an unexpectedly optimistic vision of our climate future.
Imagining the Future: Game Hacking and Youth Climate Action
Ecogames: Playful Perspectives on the Climate Crisis, 2023
This chapter explains the methodology and research design of a participatory project that investigates how board games can support young people's understanding of, and action on, the climate crisis. The project contends that the climate crisis is both a social problem and an imaginative challenge, especially for young people whose futures are most affected by it. This project moves beyond the consideration of board games as a tool for climate education, and investigates them as a means for young people (aged 16-19) to explore and communicate their ideas about climate change through processes of playing, hacking, breaking and remaking games.
Video Game Visions of Climate Futures: ARMA 3 and Implications for Games and Persuasion
This article discusses ARMA 3 (2013), a military simulation game from Bohemia Interactive. Through the prominent placement of visual representations of renewable power generation the game offers a compelling vision of the future in which current resistance to low-carbon and renewable economies have been overcome. I argue that the potential of this vision to challenge cultural futures and imaginaries is dependent on its presentation aesthetically and not, as is often suggested, on game mechanics operating in a ‘‘persuasive’’ mode. Instead, I argue that ARMA 3’s aesthetic vision can skirt around the ideological resistances players may have against accepting more didactic modes of engagement with the highly charged and ideologically contested reality of anthropogenic climate change. In this way, I suggest ARMA 3 offers a compelling challenge to current theories about games ability to persuade or influence players
Ecogames: Playful Perspectives on the Climate Crisis
Ecogames: Playful Perspectives on the Climate Crisis, 2024
With the climate crisis and its repercussions becoming more and more tangible, games are increasingly participating in the production, circulation, and interrogation of environmental assumptions, using both explicit and implicit ways of framing the crisis. Whether they are providing new spaces to imagine and practice alternative forms of living, or reproducing ecomodernist fantasies, games as well as player cultures are increasingly tuned in to the most pressing environmental concerns. This book brings together chapters by a diverse group of established and emerging authors to develop a growing body of scholarship that explores the shape, impact, and cultural context of ecogames. The book comprises four thematic sections, Today’s Challenges: Games for Change, Future Worlds: New Imaginaries, The Nonhuman Turn, and Critical Metagaming Practices. Each section explores different aspects of ecocritical engagement in and through games. As a result, the book’s comprehensive scope covers a variety of angles, methodologies, and case studies, significantly expanding the field of green media studies.
Video Games and Learning About Climate Change
Journal of Community Engagement and Scholarship, 2021
It is critical to pursue climate change education through a variety of methods, with a variety of audiences, and in a variety of contexts. This short perspectives article describes our experiences as an early-career climate change researcher and an independent game designer in responding to a community challenge posed by a nonprofit organization focused on the potential positive social impact of video games. This was an excellent opportunity to do some strategic thinking around climate change education (e.g., conceptualizing “butterfly effects”). However, we ultimately observed shortcomings in the supports available from educational and funding organizations for climate change knowledge translation using this cutting-edge medium, despite the urgency of climate change. This article follows a dialogic style, alternating between the two authors in order to provide an authentic account of our individual and collective experiences.
Gaming for Sustainability: an Overview
Proceedings of the 5th European Conference on Game Based Learning, 2011
This study explored the potential of digital games as learning environments to develop mindsets capable of dealing with complexity in the domain of sustainability. Building sustainable futures requires the ability to deal with the complex dynamics that characterize the world in which we live. As central elements in this system, we must develop the ability of constantly assessing the environment that surrounds us, operating in it and adapting to it through a continuous and iterative individual and interpersonal process of revision of our frames of reference. We must focus on our world as a whole, considering both immediate problems and long-term consequences that decision making processes could generate. Educating for sustainability demands learning approaches and environments that require the development of systems thinking and problem-solving, rather than solely the acquisition of factual knowledge. Due to their characteristics, digital games present a high potential for “learning for complexity”. Although they can be very different from one another, digital games can indeed be proper complex systems. In fact, many modern games are set in sophisticated cyberworlds, requiring players to engage in cognitively demanding tasks relying on problem-solving and decision-making skills, dealing with ill-structured problems, unpredictable circumstances, emerging system properties and behaviours, and non-linear development of events. Furthermore, these environments support remote interactions across large numbers of players, often requiring collective engagement in the pursuit of common goals. To understand how games are currently used for “learning for sustainability”, we analysed twenty games. The games were selected based on their visibility on an online search engine. The analysis showed that there is an emphasis on using single-player games to educate children and to foster the acquisition of factual knowledge. Furthermore, our results show that sustainability games often do not leverage the usage of complex systems as gaming environments, hence not fully exploiting the potential of games as learning environments to develop “thinking for complexity”.