Engaging Serious Games for Energy Efficiency

Abstract

Public engagement remains a challenge within energy behaviour change interventions, and serious games appear a promising mechanism to mitigate this. While social factors are commonly employed within such serious games, analysis of their specific impact is outstanding. This paper seeks to examine the social aspects of serious games and explore how they may be leveraged to support and incentivise energy related behaviour change. To demonstrate how social strategies may be used within a serious game to increase impact, the EVIDENT project is presented as a case study. Analysis of the literature suggests positive effects of social strategies within serious games, with peer comparison, collaboration, and competition commonly employed. However, as serious games often include multiple behaviour change strategies, both social and non-social, componential analysis is needed to determine the relative impacts of different approaches. As such, several social factors will be applied within the EVIDENT serious game including 1) stakeholder inclusion in design, 2) shared learning through social groups, 3) social inclusion, 4) social considerations to support maintenance of effects, and 5) social comparison. While positive effects for social factors within serious games are clear, this paper argues that additional analyses of how they may be best applied within serious games is needed.