The Green Gaming Project: The Role of Games in Promoting Environmental Literacy

The scientific evidence for how human activity negatively impacts the natural environment is now nearly unequivocal, but the public understanding of man-made climate change and its underlying issues still suffers from the prevalence of old-fashioned and often ineffective forms of communication strategies and -interventions. Recently, innovative and disruptive forms of communication and learning about the multifaceted nature of anthropogenic climate change are rapidly establishing themselves as promising new arenas for research and sustainable development. One of the new approaches to scientific communication about environmental issues comes in the form of games, both digital and board-based, which have captivated, engaged, and entertained mankind for millennia. Using games for learning purposes has been a viable pedagogical strategy since the early 1970s, and scientific interest in using games for sustainability education is seeing rapid growth across a variety of fields and academic disciplines. This thesis serves as a contribution towards the general understanding of how, when, and why environmental and sustainability-oriented games affect their players, and how they can be utilized as tools for increasing environmental literacy. It consists of three qualitative empirical research papers, where the overarching purpose has been to gain an understanding of how games can be used in strengthening the environmental literacy of their players. The results overall show that games can be effective tools for environmental education, especially regarding their innate ability to simplify and visualize complex systems and environmental issues that otherwise appear distant or invisible. More specifically, article 1 contains a thorough review of the research literature on the use of serious games within the fields of climate, environment and sustainability, and utilizes 249 reviews of Fate of the World, a sophisticated environmental game, to develop a game enjoyment model (the Environmental Educational Game Enjoyment Model, or ENED-GEM) for future environmental game design. Articles 2 and 3, using a qualitative approach, attempt to establish a more concrete understanding of how contemporary and commercially available environmental games affect their players. For article 2, 7 respondents were individually interviewed regarding their experiences with a digital simulated ecosystem game called Eco. The data from this study, analyzed and categorized using thematic analysis, resulted in two main themes that highlighted both game-based learning outcomes as well as barriers against learning. The findings of article 2 generally indicate that Eco is a viable tool for promoting some aspects of environmental consciousness about ecosystems, and suggestions for future implementation of Eco are provided. Lastly, article 3 contains the results from 5 focus group interviews of 17 respondents who participated in environmental board game nights arranged by the lead researcher. A thematic analysis of the datasets revealed 2 main themes: the first revolving around board games as simplified environmental simulations and the second revolving around the players’ perceptions of their own impact on the game board. Overall, the results from article 3 suggest that board games can be highly effective tools in some aspects of environmental communication. Simultaneously, the research also shows that there are significant barriers and hurdles towards the use of games for environmental education and provides preliminary future research guidelines to circumvent these barriers