“Let Us Save Venice”—An Educational Online Maze Game for Climate Resilience

Abstract

Climate resilience competencies improve people’s capacity to recognize and adopt strategies for mitigating negative climate effects. Especially concerning the built cultural heritage protection in the coastal areas, both professionals and citizens have to be prepared for water-related extreme events, such as floods, sea-level rise, and altered precipitation. Considering these challenges, the authors explore the efficiency of serious video games and describe the process of design and validation of the pilot educational online maze game “Let us save Venice”. More specifically, the main research question motivating the study is to identify what the experience factors and the mini-games are that contribute mostly to raising awareness to climate resilience and built heritage sustainability. The question implies two main research objectives: first, to explore what role user-centered game design plays in creating immersive and enjoyable educational video maze games, and second, to investigate which factors influence user experience and game playability in the design phase, and how they contribute to learnability and raising awareness. The background section of the article focuses on a preliminary study of the educational potential of serious games and introduces the EU-funded project e-Creha. Then, it explores the process of game design, development, and validation, focusing on metrics such as game learnability and game experience. The results outline the main findings that immersion, positive affect, and competence appeared to be the main experience factors contributing to raising awareness to climate resilience and built heritage sustainability. Lastly, the discussion section provides further directions for game improvement and future work.

The Effects of Sensory Cues on Immersive Experiences for Fostering Technology-Assisted Sustainable Behavior: A Systematic Review

“…Gaming is confirmed as a highly effective approach to motivating people toward sustainable awareness [ 35 ]. From reviewing earlier works, it was seen that digital gaming approaches could be applied to climate change resilience [ 6 , 36 , 37 ], waste management, [ 38 ] wastewater management [ 39 , 40 ], environmental fundraising [ 41 ], and energy conservation [ 42 , 43 ].…”

Model-Driven in Serios Games and Serious Games with User-Centered Design in the Last Decade: A Review

“…User-centered design: This tool gives us particularities of user-centered design. It teaches us to know if our project has user-centered design, as well as it shows us how it should be implement [70], [72] & [160]- [165]. Similarly, we can realize that some considerable overlapping still exists in the classification, as in some tools, before designing them, they modeled a user and advanced and used a model for the development of the application.…”

«Let’s Go Deep into the Game to Save Our Planet!» How an Immersive and Educational Video Game Reduces Psychological Distance and Raises Awareness

“…Additionally, as mentioned earlier, an immersive experience seems to have a real utility in reducing the psychological distance perceived by an individual. Despite the lack of descriptive studies on this subject, the use of serious games whose design "serves to improve skills, adapt to an environment, understand a phenomenon or better adhere to a message" [59] while maintaining the codes of video games, offers this possibility and is a mean of learning [60][61][62][63][64]. Serious games are distinguished into two categories: educational games where "the learning objective is implicit" and pedagogical games where "the learning objective is explicit" [65].…”