Evaluating the Effectiveness of an Augmented Reality Game Promoting Environmental Action

TLDR

While public awareness of climate change has grown, many people still hold misconceptions about effective individual environmental action. The study introduces PEAR, a serious game that uses geolocation and augmented reality to raise players’ awareness of climate change and their propensity for sustainable behaviours. The authors evaluated PEAR by measuring participants’ knowledge and attitudes toward climate change before and after gameplay. The study found that PEAR significantly increased participants’ knowledge and attitudes toward sustainability, demonstrating that serious games can effectively impart knowledge and promote sustainable behaviours, and it provides quantitative methods for evaluating such games.

Abstract

While public awareness of climate change has grown over the years, many people still have misconceptions regarding effective individual environmental action. In this paper, we present a serious game called PEAR, developed using elements of geolocation and augmented reality (AR), aimed at increasing players’ awareness of climate change issues and propensity for effective sustainable behaviours. We conducted a study with participants who played the game, gauging their knowledge of and attitudes towards climate change issues before and after playing the game. Our results show that the game significantly improved participants’ knowledge on sustainability and climate-change-related issues, and that it also significantly improved their attitudes towards these topics, thus proving that serious games have the potential to impart knowledge and promote sustainable behaviours. Additionally, our results address the lack of empirical studies on the knowledge base of serious sustainability games by introducing methods of quantitatively analysing the effects of serious sustainability games while additionally providing more knowledge about the effectiveness of the specific design elements of our game.