6 March 2025
Games have long been used in learning and education. This is how children learn from a very early age. Recently there has been an uptake in developing serious games for climate change issues. In this thought leadership piece I discuss how games are more than an educational tool, and why they should be taken seriously when it comes to introducing systemic interventions to address climate crisis.
If you search for games for climate change, you might come across a range of terminology, including but not limited to: games, serious games, gamification or gameful design. Sorting out terminology is a topic for another article. For the purpose of this article, I’m going to refer to them all as games that have been developed for purposes other than entertainment (Hamari, 2019).
How games are currently used
Games have been used in the context of climate change for over 40 years (Fernández Galeote et al., 2021). Many of them are educational in nature. There is space for such games, particularly for engaging kids. However, these games are based on the assumption that if we just close the knowledge gap this will lead to behavioural changes. For instance, NASA developed ClimateKids series of games. Whilst they help the kids to understand complex concepts through active experimentation, social interactions and visual representation, it is important to recognise the limits of such approach, particularly when engaging with decision makers. As time has shown, simply having knowledge will not lead to sustained transformation at the scale required to tackle climate crisis.
A very different approach focuses on facilitating behavioural change, and is rooted in nudge theory (Thaler and Sunstein, 2008), that is nudging people towards the desired behaviour by altering their interactions with the environment through the added layer of game elements introduced in the environment. This approach is the closest to what we would consider an intervention, and it has successfully been applied in areas that require consumers to change their habits. For instance, OPower, a utility energy efficiency provider, reduces energy consumption in residential buildings through normative comparison within a neighbourhood enabled by game elements. However, changing individual behaviour can only take us that far. We need organisations to change the ways in which they operate to get anywhere near climate targets.
Attempts to provide tools for supporting the making of transformation decisions can be found in combining simulations and games. An example which I use in teaching and that has certainly enabled in-depth conversations is En-Roads Climate Interactive developed by MIT. It is a dashboard with policies in different sectors, which invites you to test how policies targeting these sectors can influence the dynamics of GHG accumulation, temperature rise, energy consumption, etc., simulated using a complex system dynamics model. Attached to it is a role-play game that immerses you into the world of the UN Climate Summit, where you take the role of a stakeholder and negotiate policies. My students take it very seriously.
Such games allow you to play with different options and explore interdependencies in the system. Although they are not educational per se and the models are representative of the reality, the bigger and more complex the system these models are trying to capture, the more generic they have to be, limiting the level of insight required to make informed strategic decisions.
A deviation from such games is the type of games that are built for specific audiences or group of stakeholders from the outset. The boundaries of the system these games are trying to capture are usually much narrower, allowing the game to be more context specific. Such games usually have the ambition to start building consensus between stakeholders or mediate negotiations. An example of such game is the game that I’m developing to help devise strategies for coastal protection in Suriname. The game offers a group of players to try out different approaches to coastal protection such as mangrove restoration or building a concrete dyke, and see how these approaches will play out in response to different events (stresses). The event intensified as the game progresses, in response to climate change. The game targets different groups of stakeholders, from ministries to local residents living along the coast, to facilitate a discussion about how effective different approaches might be in the short term and long term.
Such tailored approaches proved to be very effective at facilitating such discussions. The flip side is that developing such games requires resources which can be perceived as substantial given the limited applicability of the game. For example, the behaviour of mangroves and stresses in Suriname are different from equivalent ecosystems in other parts of the world. The game will have to be adapted to other contexts.
Finally, we find games that aim at facilitating conversations that are then captured for further analysis. In this case the conversations themselves are the end goal. For instance, Jane McGonigal, the populariser of games for social change, created a series of alternate reality games, which place a player 10 years into the future and offer them signals of a major event happening. The players are then asked to describe the environment around them. One of the first such games was called World Without Oil. It offered a future where demand for oil exceeded supply. Such games are usually played over an extended period of time, for example a month, and the main challenge is to attract enough participants to engage over this time.
In one of my projects I created a smaller scale and more easily deployable game - a card game for public consultations trialled in the Lake District National Parks for sustainable transportation strategy (Spanellis et al., 2023). In this game, a group of 4-5 players is asked to develop a policy proposal from available policies or design policies of their own. The conversation (deliberations) are captured and used as evidence from public consultation. The challenge is that this game is a template that needs to be populated with new content for each consultation. This, however, might also be a strength, because it forces policymakers to think through the kind of questions they want to ask.
What games have to offer
I have always been amazed by how entertainment games, for example board games, can create all sorts of interesting, surprising and sometimes even toxic dynamics (have you ever played Monopoly with friends?). The same is true for non-entertainment games. If designed well, they can help people to express their thoughts in an environment that is safe and open to experimentation. By providing a structure (specific actions the players need to accomplish, e.g., to choose a card), and creating space for everybody to contribute (turn taking), a game can bring everybody into discussion and make it easier to have a conversation. Limited information captured on game artefacts (e.g., the impact of policies on objectives) creates an easy way to keep people talking about pros and cons, and supports scrutiny of multiple perspectives or different policies, while keeping everything on the table. At the same time, it captures the attention of the players for long enough for them to really engage with the complexity in the system. It prompts everyone involved to review existing proposals and rethink system's goals and their impact. Ultimately, it can help to identify common ground between different stakeholders.
A very important characteristic of games is their ability to capture different temporality within one game. For example, a player’s turn can represent a time frame to observe the impact of human-made structure, such as the immediate protection from building a concrete dyke; whereas the game can demonstrate slower natural processes that are more difficult to observe, such as the movement of sandbanks or deterioration of grey infrastructure. Of course, such representation will not be perfect and will not reflect accurately real life. However, this is not the point. The game is there to move the conversation. Making the game too close to real life might lock people into indecision. By collapsing the timeline, the games allow decision makers to “play out" different options and observe potential outcomes as well as the reactions of others, in an environment where the cost of failure is zero.
Games ambition
Climate Change is one of the biggest challenges humanity has ever had to face. The scale of the problem has finally captured the attention of most countries around the world including the UK, and has been captured in their strategies to transition to Net Zero by a set date. The technology required to transition to Net Zero is fairly well understood. Although in need of refining, technology solutions have largely been developed.
However, technology is only part of the problem. In order to transition to Net Zero, we also need to change the behaviour of individuals, and even more importantly, organisations, policy makers and the society. Behavioural aspect is the least understood part of the transition. Among others, it entails facilitating behavioural change to switch to new technologies, mapping out what people are prepared to change, e.g., when planning energy storage requirements, and simulating a system in which policy makers can trial different policies for Net Zero. If we look at UN SDGs, we can find behavioural components in each of the goals. Traditionally behaviour has been left to the market to adjust, but with a limited time frame to act in response to climate change we need an accelerated transition.
For the transition to accelerate, strategic and policy decisions need to be tightly coupled with consequences and collapsed in time. This can be achieved by immersing decisionmakers in an environment that allows them to play out decision options, and bringing the emotional component into the consequences of their decisions (e.g., a gamified simulation in which they have just destroyed the world). The gamified simulation can be played out by several companies at the same time, whereby they observe the real actions of each other and their impact rather than the behaviour of fictional companies in response to their actions.
Development of such environments is ambitious and can be resource consuming. But the stakes have never been higher.
References
Fernández Galeote D, Rajanen M, Rajanen D, et al. (2021) Gamification for climate change engagement: review of corpus and future agenda. Environmental Research Letters 16(6): 063004.
Hamari J (2019) Gamification. In: Ritzer G (ed.)The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology. 1st ed. Wiley, pp. 1–3 (accessed 12 February 2025).
Spanellis A, Mandhani J, Aravena C, et al. (2023) Eliciting attitudes to sustainable transportation with gamification: Research Report Version 1.0. Edinburgh: Heriot-Watt University.
Thaler RH and Sunstein CR (2008) Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness. Yale University Press.
Learn more about the work of the Gamification and Systems Thinking Lab at the University of Edinburgh Business School
Eliciting attitudes to sustainable transport policies with gamification - a gamified approach to citizen engagement in the Lake District National Park.
Accelerating solar rooftops adoption in Indonesia – incentivising renewable energy uptake in Indonesia.
Building natural barriers for flood protection in Suriname – building consensus on the use of mangroves to mitigate coastal erosion and flood risk.
Author
Agnessa Spanellis is a Senior Lecturer in Systems Thinking.