Gamification for Climate Change Engagement: A User-Centered Design Agenda

Gamification for Climate Change Engagement: A User-Centered Design Agenda

Gamification for Climate Change Engagement: A User-Centered Design Agenda

Daniel Fernández Galeote, Mikko Rajanen, Dorina Rajanen, Nikoletta-Zampeta Legaki, David J. Langley, Juho Hamari

Abstract

"Policymakers and environmental organizations are increasingly im-plementing gamification because of its ability to stimulate playful learning and transform human attitudes and behavior. Although it has become a prominent development for climate change engage-ment, the literature does not adequately address how the underlying motivational systems depend upon user-centered design mecha-nisms. If gamification is to realize its potential for climate change engagement, it is crucial for designers to apply solid user-centered design principles, as suboptimal designs may do more harm than good. Therefore, we conducted a systematic literature review on gamification for climate change engagement to investigate the application of user-centered design and find key links between design choices and outcomes in 64 articles. We develop the find-ings into a user-centered design agenda and framework for game- based climate change engagement. This agenda includes design aspects–team multidisciplinarity, context dependence, user involve-ment, iterative testing, and design choice explication–and outcome aspects–value to users, game mechanics for learning, game content for learning, affective engagement, social engagement, changing real-world behavior, and using game data for research. The agenda is intended to inform gamification academics and practitioners aim- ing to design effective games for climate change engagement and its recommendations may apply to other complex issues."

Reference

Fernández Galeote, D., Rajanen, M., Rajanen, D., Legaki, N.-Z., Langley, D. J., & Hamari, J. (2023). Gamification for climate change engagement: A user-centered design agenda. Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3616961.3616968

Keywords

Gamification, Serious Games, Game-based Learning