Evaluation of a pervasive game for domestic energy engagement among teenagers

Abstract

In this article, we present Power Agent-a pervasive game designed to encourage teenagers and their families to reduce energy consumption in the home. The ideas behind this mobile phonebased game are twofold; to transform the home environment and its devices into a learning arena for hands-on experience with electricity usage and to promote engagement via a team competition scheme. We report on the game's evaluation with six teenagers and their families who played the game for ten days in two cities in Sweden. Data collection consisted of home energy measurements before, during, and after a game trial, in addition to interviews with participants at the end of the evaluation. The results suggest that the game concept was highly efficient in motivating and engaging the players and their families to change their daily energy-consumption patterns during the game trial. Although the evaluation does not permit any conclusions as to whether the game had any postgame effects on behavior, we can conclude that the pervasive persuasive game approach appears to be highly promising in regard to energy conservation and similar fields or issues.

Power explorer

“…In the previous Power Agent trial [5] the participants did indeed demonstrate a shift in attitude towards energy conservation. After the game, participants claimed that they were still motivated and committed to continue to save energy.…”

“…of the game is shared. The social interaction emerging from this -which could be seen in Power Agent [5] -seems to generate a more natural platform for shared reflections, experiences and interpretations of events.…”

“…Studies of home electricity consumption have shown that people's behavior plays an important role when it comes to excessive energy usage [2]. The savings potential -by changing energy usage behaviors in the home -is estimated to lie between 10-30% [2][3] [5]. Engaging people in making these -of-ten small -behavior changes to reduce electricity consumption and emissions of CO 2 is therefore crucial.…”

“…In earlier work, we have shown that a mobile pervasive game connected to the players' energy meters can be used as a powerful tool in order to both motivate and educate teenagers and their families towards energy conservation in the home [4] [5]. This game used consumption data that was updated every 24h from automatic meter systems employed by energy utility companies.…”

“…Two teams of teenagers competed to save energy in the evenings and received results the following morning. The evaluation [5] of this concept named Power Agent, with teenagers and families playing the game for a period of 10 days showed a remarkable reduction in energy consumption (both heat and electricity were measured). However, the study was not able to show any persistent long-term energy conserving effects on the participants as energy consumption basically returned to normal within a few days after the game trial had ended.…”