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CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS article

Front. Psychol.
Sec. Environmental Psychology
Volume 15 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1414705
This article is part of the Research Topic How Do Behavior Science Interventions to Reduce Environmental Impacts Work in The Real World? View all 15 articles

Expanding the Green Gaming Horizon: A Conceptual Analysis of and Proposed Guidelines for Upscaling Environmental Game Usage in Climate Education

Provisionally accepted
  • Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Despite the now unequivocal notion that climate change is driven by anthropogenic activity, communication between concerned climate scientists and laypeople about the severity of the issue is still muddy. Although creative and more approachable venues of communication to climate change and sustainability issues are being explored more regularly than before, there is still room for improvement and upscaling in the attempts to link scientists and laypeople together in the understanding of these outstanding issues. This also applies to the field of environmental gaming, which has become more popular in the recent decade. Despite this increasing popularity, however, most environmental gaming studies exist as small-scale pilot studies that often result in generating limited, albeit promising results in terms of increasing awareness and knowledge around environmental topics. This article explores the use of games in climate-and sustainability education and provides a set of assisting guidelines to ease the process of using games as communication tools about these pressing issues, as well as providing advice on how to upscale environmental gaming from a set of limited pilot studies.

    Keywords: Environmental games, serious games, upscaling, sustainability, Science Communication

    Received: 09 Apr 2024; Accepted: 31 Dec 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Fjællingsdal. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Kristoffer Skomsøy Fjællingsdal, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.