Gamification for Sustainable Development

Abstract

Gamification has become a fairly recent addition to the topics covered in the Simulation & Gaming journal. This approach, focusing on influencing users' behaviour and engaging them through the integration of game design elements into other processes, practices, interfaces, etc. (Huotari & Hamari, 2012), has also naturally found an area of application in efforts to promote sustainability. The field of simulation/gaming has a long history of using games to teach and raise awareness about sustainability issues (Nguyen et al., 2024;Robinson & Ausubel, 1983;Tribaldos & Schneider, 2021), covering all of the areas addressed by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The number of games produced to this end has grown in recent years, with many new titles combining economic, societal, and environmental aspects in their approaches (Stanitsas et al., 2019). Katsaliaki and Mustafee (2015), in their review of educational games for sustainability, conclude that games generally are able to improve the players' understanding of the issues at hand. Understanding, however, might not be enough. Although many of these studies start from the premise that known solutions to existing sustainability problems are not actioned because of people's lack of knowledge (Agusdinata et al., 2023), it is widely recognised that knowledge about or attitude towards certain issues or solutions do not always translate into the desired behaviour (Vermeir & Verbeke, 2006).Gamification has therefore emerged as a possible solution to the gap between knowledge and action in the field of sustainable development. This approach expands the idea of using games to promote sustainability one step further. In addition to creating new games addressing these issues, gamification proposes to use elements, dynamics and strategies traditionally associated with games in other contexts. This still allows to inform people of sustainability issues, but can also be used to motivate them to