Leveraging a collaborative augmented reality serious game to promote sustainability awareness, commitment and adaptive problem-management

Abstract

The sustainable development of our global world requires innovative educational approaches to foster people’s ability to pursue common goals under ever-changing and uncontrollable environmental conditions. Serious games can meet this need by engaging learners in collective problem-solving activities that mimic real-world sustainability problems and scenarios. This paper presents the design and evaluation of Sustain, a collaborative and co-located multiplayer sustainability serious game. Sustain is an Augmented Reality based urban development game that aims to promote player awareness and commitment to sustainability problems and enhance players’ ability to address these problems through collaborative and adaptive problem management approaches. Sustain was developed based on nine key game features that implement principles of serious game design tailored for sustainability. The evaluation of the game leveraged a multimodal approach that included in-game analytics, questionnaires, and observational data from ninety-nine participants and aimed to assess learning outcomes and identify relationships between game features and effects achieved. Results suggest that Sustain was effective in changing players’ awareness of and commitment towards sustainability issues. Team adaptive behaviours and increasing collaborative interactions were observed during the game, even during phases that did not require close collaboration, which is altogether suggestive of increased collaborative and adaptive problem-management capabilities. These findings suggest that the development of sustainability serious games based on design principles and features similar to those implemented in Sustain can lead to impacts crucial for sustainability education.