Can gamified approaches promote climate change engagement?
“Gamification can engage players’ climate change cognition, affect and behavior and provide engaging gameful experiences, but research and design in this area can still improve.”
Engaging with climate change goes way beyond being aware of scientific facts. Active engagement comprises an ongoing state of connection consisting of three dimensions: cognitive (knowing, or involving the head), affective (caring, or involving the heart), and behavioral (acting, or rolling up one’s sleeves) (Lorenzoni et al., 2007). These apply whether we aim to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and enhance sinks, or prepare human communities and activities for present and future climate risks and impacts.
But how can we contribute to systematically engaging vastly different people with a complex topic? Gamification, or the use of games across society, culture, and technology for purposes other than entertainment (Hamari, 2019), has been lauded in the last decade as a promising avenue for engagement with multiple societal issues through engagement and enjoyment (Koivisto & Hamari, 2019).
Our openly accessible review of the state-of-the-art field examines the use of games and gamification to engage diverse actors with climate science, mitigation, and adaptation issues. Our analysis suggests that gamification can impact multiple engagement dimensions simultaneously and provide engaging gameful experiences. Among other benefits, it can motivate, result in learning through experience, provide safe social spaces, and support complex topics through visual support.
Gamification as an avenue to tackle the climate crisis
Climate change poses an existential threat both to biodiversity and human societies through impacts such as extreme weather and sea-level rise (IPCC, 2018). While public concern remains high, widespread active engagement is required from all societal actors according to their responsibility and power to effect change. Since psychological and social conditions hinder effective engagement with climate change, approaches that take into account the complexities of humans’ relationship to the crisis are needed. Public engagement strategies that take into account situated contexts and understandings is vital (Wibeck, 2014).
Our motivation in researching gamification (which includes concepts such as commercial games, serious games, game-based learning, simulation, and gaming, etc.) is to understand how gamification has driven climate change engagement, and how to expand this area in the future. Although gameful experiences can motivate and immerse players, support learning through hands-on experiences and visual environments in real or simulated contexts, and provide safe spaces to engage as a collective, evidence on the effectiveness of game-based interventions to enhance climate change engagement is not well integrated. By providing a current systematic review of game-based climate change engagement research, we aim to provide a picture of the landscape and an informed agenda for the future.
How to improve a promising area of research and design
Our analysis of 64 papers indicates that game-based climate change engagement is a nascent and growing area of research, with all studies published in the last decade. In them, it can be seen that digital, analog, and hybrid gamification is applied to multiple areas of human activity, including climate science literacy, mitigation, and adaptation. Of the three areas of engagement, cognition seems to be the most researched, but positive engagement results in all other dimensions were reported. Many interventions adapt to the players’ habits and needs, such as digital games for the young and rigorous role-plays for professionals. Contrary to traditional criticisms of gamified solutions as simplistic in their design, over three-quarters of the games included achievement-oriented, immersion, and social elements.
However, research and design could improve in several areas. More social, political, and economic actors could be targeted by gamified experiences, K-12 children in particular. Future research should gather more information on the participants’ backgrounds to properly contextualize the outcomes of interventions. In addition, further involvement of emerging and developing economies should be sought.
Many interventions that target specific behaviors could connect more explicitly with climate change in order to contextualize particular issues within the larger frame of global emergency and provide a holistic reason for action. Especially important is to explore topics that are crucial but underrepresented, such as tipping points or the health impacts of the climate crisis. Furthermore, games have the advantage that actions carried out by players can have real-world impacts by design. We should not forget that games can be combined with other methods, for example as part of larger literacy programs, courses, and other events.
Any future research paths should be followed seeking, when possible, data on long-term and behavioral outcomes. Moreover, we need more rigorous data collection and analysis, so results will be more reliable, and consider ethical issues such as privacy and safety.
Six opportunities and responsibilities for the future
Professionals, policymakers, and laypeople are only some of the populations that could benefit from game-based engagement with climate change. Our review reveals many examples from e.g., educational and professional sectors, from water management and agriculture to basic climate literacy for students and laypeople.
This leaves us with several opportunities and responsibilities. Among these, we can highlight six. First, to pursue active engagement, including but not limited to the understanding of scientific data. Second, to empower a diversity of actors. Third, to consider their psychological and social experiences, that is, their forms of living and understanding climate-related issues, which at this point covers almost any issue, in order to provide adaptive, engaging, and enjoyable experiences. Fourth, to connect topic-specific interventions with climate change and other environmental crises that decisively influence ecosystems and human life. Fifth, to take advantage of games’ capacity to integrate real-world action with in-game challenges. And sixth, to do so with attention to relevant ethical issues and scientific rigor.
Gamification for climate change engagement: review of corpus and future agenda
David J. Langley
Reference:Fernández Galeote, D., Rajanen, M., Rajanen, D., Legaki, N. Z., Langley, D. J., & Hamari, J. (2021). Gamification for climate change engagement: review of corpus and future agenda. Environmental Research Letters, 16(6). https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/abec05
See the paper for full details:
Abstract
Both bottom-up and top-down initiatives are essential for addressing climate change effectively. These include initiatives aiming to achieve widespread behavioral change towards reduction of greenhouse gas emissions as well as pursuing education regarding adaptation measures. While awareness of the issue of climate change is now pervasive, and actions are being taken at all levels of society, there is still much to do if international goals are to be met. Games and gamification offer one approach to foster both behavioral change and education. In this paper, we investigate the state-of-the-art of game-based climate change engagement through a systematic literature review of 64 research outputs comprising 56 different gamified approaches. Our analysis of the literature reveals a trend of promising findings in this nascent and growing area of research, suggesting the potential to impact multiple engagement dimensions simultaneously, as well as create an engaging gameful experience. Overall, the corpus appears to offer a fruitful balance in foci between climate science, mitigation, and adaptation, as well as a variety of formats in game-based approaches (i.e. digital, analog, and hybrid). However, shortcomings were also observed, such as geographic and demographic imbalances and the short duration of interventions. The reviewed studies yield a large number of results indicating climate change engagement through gamification, especially in the form of cognitive engagement, affect towards climate change-related topics, and in-game behavioral engagement with others. Nevertheless, heterogeneity in terms of contexts, designs, outcomes, and methods, as well as limited rigor in research designs and reporting, hinders drawing overall conclusions. Based on our review, we provide guidelines regarding contexts, interventions, results, and research quality and internal validity for advancing the space of game-based interventions for climate change engagement.
References
Hamari, J. (2019). Gamification. In The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, G. Ritzer (Ed.). https://doi.org/10.1002/9781405165518.wbeos1321
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (2018). Global Warming of 1.5°C. An IPCC Special Report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty. https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/
Koivisto, J., & Hamari, J. (2019). The rise of motivational information systems: A review of gamification research. International Journal of Information Management, 45, 191-210. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2018.10.013
Lorenzoni, I., Nicholson-Cole, S., & Whitmarsh, L. (2007) Barriers Perceived to Engaging with Climate Change Among the UK Public and Their Policy Implications. Global Environmental Change, 17(3-4), 445-459. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2007.01.004
Wibeck, V. (2014). Enhancing learning, communication and public engagement about climate change–some lessons from recent literature. Environmental Education Research, 20(3), 387-411. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2013.812720
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