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

Boyan Bontchev,Albena Antonova,Yavor Dankov,Valentina Terzieva

doi:10.3390/su14010007

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.

Highlights

The intensity and frequency of extreme weather events are among the key visible outcomes of accelerating climate change
At the beginning of this section, we presented our concept of the user-centered design (UCD) approach, which positions the user at the center of the process of designing and creating educational video games
The learning outcomes, measured by game points, hidden objects collected, and time for playing proves that players, most of whom are not used to playing games, succeeded in completing the game learning objectives. The analyses of both the survey and semi-structured interviews provide an answer to the research question stated in the introduction: immersion, positive affect, and competence appeared to be the main experience factors contributing to raising awareness of climate resilience and built heritage sustainability

Summary

Introduction

The intensity and frequency of extreme weather events are among the key visible outcomes of accelerating climate change. The MOSE project [3] promotes proactive strategies for coping with high floods, generated by extreme weather conditions These initiatives have to be properly studied and popularized amongst the larger community of professionals: architects, urban designers, building engineers, city planners, technical experts, and others, who need to better understand them and prepare the climate resilience strategies [4]. Serious games have an explicit and carefully considered educational purpose and are not intended to be played primarily for entertainment. He asserts that this does not mean that they should not be fun and enjoyable [11]. A more modern definition is given in [15]:

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion