Fig 4 - uploaded by Rafael Bidarra
Content may be subject to copyright.
Source publication
Presently, one of the greatest challenges of hu-
mankind is climate change. It is usually assumed that its
mitigation will require an extensive adaptation in many human
habits. As every fourth ton of carbon dioxide emitted can be
attributed to the food chain, it is argued that one of the most
effective actions an individual can take is changing tow...
Contexts in source publication
Context 1
... graphs in Figure 4 show the main results of this preliminary evaluation. Overall, it can be observed that people did reflect on the knowledge acquired in the game and became more aware of the effects an animal-based diet has on the planet (Figure 4a). ...
Context 2
... graphs in Figure 4 show the main results of this preliminary evaluation. Overall, it can be observed that people did reflect on the knowledge acquired in the game and became more aware of the effects an animal-based diet has on the planet (Figure 4a). Goal setting is the most preferred game mechanic (Figure 4b) because, according to the open answers provided, goals allow people to set their own pace and strive for an attainable objective in the near future. ...
Context 3
... it can be observed that people did reflect on the knowledge acquired in the game and became more aware of the effects an animal-based diet has on the planet (Figure 4a). Goal setting is the most preferred game mechanic (Figure 4b) because, according to the open answers provided, goals allow people to set their own pace and strive for an attainable objective in the near future. The energy spending and goal attainment proved to be engaging aspects of the game (Figure 4c). ...
Context 4
... setting is the most preferred game mechanic (Figure 4b) because, according to the open answers provided, goals allow people to set their own pace and strive for an attainable objective in the near future. The energy spending and goal attainment proved to be engaging aspects of the game (Figure 4c). ...
Citations
... Notable examples are Blevis' 2007 proposal of sustainable interaction design [7], and the rich literature exploring the principle of eco-feedback, defined by Froehlich et al. as "technologies that provide feedback on individual or group behaviours with a goal of reducing environmental impact" [22]. Such technologies focused a lot on energy consumption (see [5,24,44,45,54]), but eco-feedback applications also explore other sustainable practices, such as encouraging composting [36], supporting the transition to a vegan diet [12], raising awareness about CO 2 emissions related to taxi trips [39] or about water and energy consumption of one's laundry [23]. However, the global society is composed of diverse sets of individuals, states, companies, and associations. ...
... Climate Game 2 is a self-logging mobile application for food, transportation and housing, using a cartoon island that changes according to the data entered by users, changing the colour of the sky, the water and the land of the island. Veganity, your journey is a serious game [12] using food self-logging allowing the player to spend virtual energy to improve the sustainability of the world by investing in infrastructure in a virtual countryside. ...
It can be difficult to extrapolate how decisions made in our daily lives impact the environment in the long term. While rich data and many calculator tools are freely available, comparing how different choices add up over time remains a complex and tedious task. In this paper, we focus on the specific case of dietary habits and explore how long-term consequences of different dietary choices may be communicated using a mini-world as a proxy, where decisions of one person affect the entire mini-world. We focus on three planetary boundaries: climate change, global freshwater use and land system change. After describing the prototype, we report insights from interviews conducted with three experts who tested it. The results suggest that the mini-world has potential for facilitating the comparison of environmental consequences linked to dietary habits. At the same time, numerous improvements have also been proposed.
... Furthermore, it is also pointed out that a player's skills should dominate over luck, since too much reliance on luck would discourage the players from performing better. This same design principle has been applied in other real-world datarelated serious games, to improve player's insight into the phenomena revealed by that same data [4], [5]. ...
The science of collecting and analyzing vast amounts of data to make predictions or derive other types of conclusions is often called Big Data. It is expected that a new generation of college students will be studying and working with Big Data. However, at the secondary school level, a serious lack of knowledge about it has often been detected. We designed a serious game to introduce students to this topic. Because Big Data is far too complex to teach in a single game, we focused our game design on two main elements: data collection and data analysis. The game raises awareness on these topics by immersing players in realistic situations, in which they strategically place data collection centers and use the collected data to answer various appealing queries and scenarios. These scenarios exemplify several opportunities and risks of real-world uses of Big Data. From a preliminary evaluation of the game, we conclude that the current game design leads to a statistically significant increase in awareness.
... Serious games are not developed only for the health domain, they exist in other domains such as the learning/education domain [23] and in e-commerce [2]. In this study, we identified serious games that were developed to influence energy conservation [20], [8] and the reuse of waste materials for environmental sustainability [21]. ...
... Rewards are used in different ways in the PT we reviewed. For example, in designing the serious game, Veganity, to influence sustainable food management, Böhm et al. [8] implemented rewards in the form of energy that players can invest in various sustainable actions such as planting trees or collecting plastics. Hedin et al. [20] developed Energy Piggy Bank, a serious game to educate people about their own energy consumption and to influence players to positively change their behavior towards more sustainable energy habits. ...
... The duration of the evaluations ranged from an hour [9] to a year [10]. A range of participants was recruited for the different studies, with a minimum of two [43] participants and a maximum of 944 [25] participants.The trend of articles from 2016 to 2021 (the period Posluszny et al. [35] Virtual Reality Scarcity, social proof Böhm et al. [8] Serious game Tailoring, self-monitoring, rewards, Casado-Mansilla et al. [10] IoT devices Tunneling, reduction, suggestion, cooperation Hedin et al. [20] Serious game Self-monitoring, comparison, feedback, social comparison, reminders, rewards Mylonas et al. [25] IoT devices Gamification, self-monitoring Vilarinho et al. [43] Web application Feedback, and Social norm, social cues, scores, leaderboard -ranking, suggestions Sattar et al. [37] Mobile application Suggestions, authority Páris et al. [33] IoT Feedback, leaderboard, rewards, suggestions, self-monitoring Kazhamiakin et al. [22] Mobile app rewards, comparison, feedback Phiri et al. [34] Mobile app Reminders Ibrahim et al. [21] Mobile app Rewards, goal setting Theodorou et al. [42] Serious game Cooperation, competition Bremer Christina [9] Mobile app Suggestions, reminders Scurati et al. [38] IoT Rewards Taha et al. [41] Web application Feedback, self-monitoring, comparison, competition, Anagnostopoulou et al. [7] Mobile app Self-monitoring, comparison, suggestion Figure 4. The highest number of articles were published between 2018 and 2020 accounting for 75% of the articles that we reviewed. ...
Persuasive technologies are interactive systems that are designed to influence people to change their attitudes or behaviours. Persuasive technologies have been used successfully in several domains including health to make people exercise more, shopping to make people buy specific products, and social media to make people contribute better content. In the area of sustainability, its use is not well documented. To contribute to the use of persuasive technologies in sustainability, this paper carries out a literature review of published articles in the area in the past five years and summarizes the main findings based on three main themes: the design and development of the technology to make it adaptive to users, the evaluation of the technology, and the findings from the evaluation. Our results suggest that most persuasive technologies are developed as mobile applications, IoT devices or serious games and the most common behaviour change targeted by the persuasive technologies in this domain are energy conservation and sustainable food management. The most common persuasive strategies that are used are rewards, suggestions and self-monitoring. In terms of evaluation, a self-reported evaluation method was applied by most authors. While the range of evaluation of the developed persuasive technologies was between one hour and one year, the number of recruited participants ranged from two to over nine hundred. The findings from the evaluation were mostly mixed with several authors reporting positive results (behaviour change) for some participants. Based on these results, we suggest considerations for the development of future persuasive technologies for sustainability.
... Especially due to their interactivity, games have become a particularly effective tool for this purpose. Compared to other forms of media, games have the potential to retain a higher engagement rate [8], immerse players in a different perspective [4], and possibly even change their attitude or behavior [13,7]. The responses to the audiovisual nature of serious games have been proven to be more useful in measuring their effectiveness [20]. ...
Implicit biases towards groups of people is acquiring an increasingly stronger focus in many areas of our society. Recognizing these biases is a difficult task, as biases are subconscious and socially unacceptable. We propose Stranded, a game in which players are led to reveal and recognize possible racial and gender biases. Players face challenges, inspired by real-world examples of bias-inducing situations, where they must assign the type of person they think fits a particular task, in a group survival context, and with limited time and knowledge. After each round, the ideal character for each task is given away through small hints; ultimately, players will not survive the challenge if they ignore them and rely on prior biases. This spurs players to think more deeply about characters in terms of inner strengths rather than prior biases. Stranded is an effective tool for raising interesting classroom discussions, by anonymously collecting the decisions made by all players, and showing their aggregate outcomes per task, which easily leads to a conversation on the motivation for certain decisions. An evaluation of Stranded shows that it is effective at provoking players to make biased judgements and that a considerable percentage of players felt more aware of their biases after playing the game.
... There have been various serious games made with the goal of informing players about environmental issues, often trying to change their attitude or view on a certain topic. Examples of this are Veganity, your journey, proposing players to consider more sustainable diets for environmental reasons [12], Reto Global, a game made for a museum exhibition to support climate change awareness [13], and Hydro Hero, also made for a museum, to educate children on the environmental relevance of water maintenance [14]. ...
Many people think of reforestation projects as one-dimensional, simply consisting of planting trees. In reality, a reforestation project takes into account a wide variety of factors, of which the three most important are improving soil quality, reducing fire hazard, and ensuring the prosperity of the community. We posit that a simplistic view on such projects is detrimental for a more committed and serious societal awareness and support of sustainable reforestation. Therefore, it is desirable that more people have a better understanding of the interplay of these factors, as they will likely become more involved in reforestation projects. We present Benni's Forest, a serious game aimed at increasing awareness of the challenges of reforestation projects. Benni's Forest is a simulation game, in which the player is responsible for a reforestation project, balancing its various factors over the years, deciding on what to do when and where on the terrain, e.g. fertilizing, planting trees, or digging fire ditches. Meanwhile, adverse events, like wildfires or illegal logging, threaten your progress, creating a tension that gives the player a vivid experience of the complexity of the project. As you progress, several scores indicate the quality of your performance, most notably a biodiversity score, representing the amount and variety of trees in the forest. In this way, players receive clear hints to strategize and face each situation with the appropriate measures to grow a biodiverse forest. We evaluated Benni's Forest conducting a survey amongst players. The results confirm both an increased understanding of the challenges involved in reforestation efforts, and an increased sense of engagement of players with such projects.
... Irrespective of whether one is dealing with a gamified system or game-based learning, there is a lot to be spoken for in terms of what game mechanics can offer in terms of learning, and language learning in particular. Games can fundamentally be reduced to so-called regular core game loops (Böhm et al., 2021;Sicart, 2015). In the simplest of terms, these loops are the things the player regularly does in the game, or the cycles of player actions. ...
Gamification is a trend that is steadfastly increasing in popularity in several fields that involve learning. Several concepts borne out of this have recently been applied with the intent to facilitate second language learning. This is most notably visible in the form of apps and online teaching courses that take advantage of mechanics that are drawn directly from video game design principles. In the context of language learning, the incorporation of game mechanics can be used to construct effective systems of incentive and ultimately enrich the FL learning experience in various ways, potentially resulting in improved outcomes. However, the prevailing trend in the gamification of language learning apps is to rely on a Black Hat gamification mechanics. These are propagated without much reflection in manner that can only be described as perfunctory gamification. Nevertheless, the subpopulation of so-called hardcore gamers is not only unsusceptible to these techniques, but exhibits a strong aversion to them. As a result, hardcore gamers are for the most part functionally excluded from the pool of potential CALL app users. The present work outlines several potential solutions to the problem of perfunctory game design practices that alienate hardcore gamers. Chief among these is the proposal to actively work towards a paradigm shift from gamification towards game-based learning.
As the global environmental crisis intensifies, there has been a significant interest in behavior change games (BCGs), as a viable venue to empower players’ pro-environmentalism. This pro-environmental empowerment is well-aligned with the notion of environmental citizenship (EC), which aims at transforming citizens into “environmental agents of change”, seeking to achieve more sustainable lifestyles. Despite these arguments, studies in this area are thinly spread and fragmented across various research domains. This article is grounded on a systematic review of empirical articles on BCGs for EC covering a time span of fifteen years and published in peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings, in order to provide an understanding of the scope of empirical research in the field. In total, 44 articles were reviewed to shed light on their methodological underpinnings, the gaming elements and the persuasive strategies of the deployed BCGs, the EC actions facilitated by the BCGs, and the impact of BCGs on players’ EC competences. Our findings indicate that while BCGs seem to promote pro-environmental knowledge and attitudes, such an assertion is not fully warranted for pro-environmental behaviors. We reflect on our findings and provide future research directions to push forward the field of BCGs for EC.
