Games in Socioenvironmental Research

Abstract

In recent years, games have emerged to offer new opportunities for studying socioenvironmental systems, and online games in particular offer a low-cost option for collecting rich data from diverse populations. Compared to the now well-established popularity of education games, research games remain uncommon outside of economics and social psychology; however, the emergence of technology that makes the development and deployment of games easier creates opportunities for new research communities. The following discussion has three specific objectives. The first is to introduce the reader to nonentertainment games applied to socioenvironmental topics. The second is to pose and address key practical questions that reveal both the unique research opportunities that games provide and some of the challenges to any future applications in socioenvironmental research. The third is to briefly discuss some new topics in which games can contribute to future socioenvironmental research. Although games will never replace existing data collection modalities, they offer an alternative that may be well-suited to the study of environmental conflict and nonuse values of environmental goods.