Gamification and Climate Change Engagement: Building knowledge, developing practice, and studying experiences and effects

Building a sustainable way of life for humans is crucial for the future of life on Earth as we know it, with climate change being a defining and complex, interconnected, and often overwhelming sustainability challenge. Since climate action is both urgent and currently insufficient, widespread citizen implication to enact and demand effective change is needed. Of the multiple methods proposed to support climate change engagement, gamification and games are some of the most intriguing. Although some scholarly study has been done to understand their effects and possible role in tackling this issue, multiple gaps still exist between the tentative optimism in the public discourse and a realistic understanding of their true potential.

This dissertation aims to analyze the state of the art of gamified climate change engagement, including the scientific literature and existing games, and to assess the cognitive, affective, and behavioral engagement effects of a new climate change game, Climate Connected: Outbreak, which I designed following best practices. For this, the work is situated at the interdisciplinary intersection between (a) gamification, understood as an umbrella term including also serious games and game-based learning, with its focus on the study of game systems and human motivation, and (b) climate change engagement, which denotes a state of cognitive, affective, and behavioral connection with climate change and typically applies concepts from fields such as psychology, communication science, and pedagogy. The work takes from, and contributes to, all these perspectives, and adds to our understanding of the role of gamification in tackling similarly wicked problems and grand challenges. The findings are derived from five studies. First, a systematic review of empirical scientific literature (N=64) was conducted, followed by a review of existing digital game artifacts (N=80). Then, based on identified gaps and best practices, the game Climate Connected: Outbreak was designed, developed, and implemented as a research artifact. The game’s effects were examined both qualitatively (N=12) and quantitatively (N=105), in the latter case in a controlled experiment in which participants were assigned to three groups—text-based control, PC game, and immersive virtual reality (VR) game. The chosen methods approach the phenomenon of gamified climate change engagement from multiple perspectives and focus on diverse objects of study—from literature to games and players.

The findings of this dissertation advance our understanding of the potential of gamified interventions for climate change engagement. Publication I systematically reviews the extant empirical corpus of gamified climate change engagement, with a focus on contexts and populations, designs, outcomes, and research quality. It offers a design agenda that highlights, among other issues, the need for more meticulously designed and reported research; the existence of potentially useful but neglected communication frames; the promising effects of supporting behavior by design; and the fact that audiences are often framed in rigid and conventional ways (e.g., as consumers or professionals), neglecting other possible citizen roles. Publication II analyzes digital games that include climate action and examines the avatar identities and actions in them. The study uncovers six types of avatar identity in these games, including a scarcity of citizen and empowered individual roles, and shows how citizen action in games is typically limited to lifestyle choices and public participation.

With the insights gathered from the previous publications, Publication III describes the use of Climate Connected: Outbreak, a single-player, story-based digital game for climate change engagement. The game considers gaps and recommendations such as the use of a health and wellbeing framing, a complex and open understanding of the citizen’s identity towards climate change, and the use of immersive VR as an underexplored medium. The results of user research suggest four themes for the participants’ serious game experience—continuity, discontinuity, divergence, and topic engagement. Publications IV and V examine and compare the game’s and control’s effects on learning, climate change attitudes, environmental self-efficacy, and pro-environmental intentions and behavior. The results suggest that games like the one used can be as effective as traditional media in engaging people with climate change while providing a more enjoyable experience, especially in the case of immersive VR. In toto, this dissertation offers a holistic foray into the multidisciplinary area of gamified climate change engagement, offering rigorous studies of literature, games, and player experiences and outcomes as steppingstones to the future development of this area.