Teaching sustainability to a broad audience through an entertainment game – The effect of Catan: Oil Springs

Abstract

In order to attain a truly sustainable society it is necessary for people to make 'the sustainable choice' in daily life, business and governance. Instrumental in increasing the awareness and understanding about sustainability issues and improving people's behaviour regarding sustainability issues is sustainability education. However, sustainability education is not yet widespread and is found to not always be effective in tackling people's behavioural aspects regarding sustainability issues. This paper addresses a novel form of sustainability education that has potentially both a wide reach and tackles behavioural aspects of sustainability issues directly: serious gaming. It is shown how an entertainment game, a scenario expansion for the popular board-game Settlers of Catan, can be used to educate a broad audience on sustainability issues. Through a causal analysis of the educational mechanisms embedded in the game scenario the strategies that players might use were found. Subsequently, workshops were held to observe how players are affected by playing the game. The results suggest that playing the game affects people's attitude towards sustainability and, predominantly, the sustainability of the behaviour. Although only the second finding could be supported by statistical tests, the anecdotal observations and quantitative findings do point in the same direction. It was found that the sustainability concepts embedded in the game together with the gameplay dynamics drove the educational effects of the game. These game dynamics enable players to experience real sustainability issues: players are forced to reconsider their strategies, not necessarily to save the Island of Catan, but for their own victory in the gamewhich is a strong lesson related to sustainability in general and climate change specifically. Future research should focus on conducting larger-scale surveys supporting the execution of statistical tests. In addition, this research points at the untapped potential of teaching sustainability concepts through entertainment games and suggests that game developers incorporate sustainability concepts through educational mechanisms in their games.

Developing science tabletop games: ‘Catan’® and global warming

“…From anecdotal evidence received via social media, email communication, and other channels, the authors know that it has been played and enjoyed several hundred times, and that in playing the game the gamers have also engaged in dialogue around global warming both at and away from the tabletop. However, in order to fully measure the impact of the game in developing this dialogue, a further study would be needed, which is beyond the scope of the work presented here (for the interested reader, Chappin, Bijvoet and Oei [2017] give a detailed account of how this might be achieved with regards to the teaching of sustainability issues). A further limitation of this study arises from the bias of the playtesters, and in particular a failure to specifically playtest with people that initially self-identified as being either climate change deniers or else agnostic about the negative effects of anthropogenic global warming.…”

“…Therefore we encourage our consumers and trade customers to employ our IP freely for personal use. [Catan, 2019] Catan, a game already the subject of much academic work (including discussions of sustainability [Assadourian and Hansen, 2011;Chappin, Bijvoet and Oei, 2017], artificial intelligence [Chaslot et al, 2008], and colonialism [Veracini, 2013] ) was also chosen for its thematic fit (it is about the settling of a new land) and the way in which it embeds player interaction into its core game mechanics. There are also a number of expansion and scenario packs that have previously been developed for Catan, which further demonstrate its popularity and accessibility and which confirmed the viability of modifying the base game for our purposes.…”

“…In addition, the removal of numbered tokens causes the GHG level to increase and should this reach a critical level (13), Catan is declared uninhabitable and the game ends immediately. In this the game takes inspiration from Catan Scenarios: Oil Springs which has a similar endgame condition in which there is no clear winner, only a "pyrrhic victory" for the player who has at least tried to mitigate the effects of pollution on the island [Chappin, Bijvoet and Oei, 2017].…”

Coming to Action: Operationalizing City Resilience

“…However, taking into account the fact that city resilience is a complex concept, even with the development of tools such as maturity models, decision-makers are still requesting tools that enable them to train themselves in the resilience-building process. In this sense, the serious game has been defined as an effective tool for teaching, motivating and simulating decisions [40][41][42][43][44]. Serious games are defined as "applications using the characteristics of video or computer games to create engaging and immersive learning experiences for delivering specified learning goals, outcomes and experience" [45].…”

Narrativas de sostenibilidad en emprendedores sociales de Lima Metropolitana

“…Dado que los hallazgos narrativos de este estudio, no remiten solo a vivencias primarias de la infancia de los participantes, sino a una transversalidad de experiencias e información capitalizada por ellos para fundamentar su actuar, resulta relevante interpelar al mismo entorno académico-universitario (Giraldo-Mejía & Vara-Horna, 2018), para analizar los procesos de educación superior y los contenidos axiológicos y reflexivos sobre los cuales se forman los futuros empresarios y profesionales para la sociedad. En asociación con esta interpelación y con la teoría revisada sobre el pensamiento sistémico vinculado a la conciencia de sostenibilidad (que indica que esta modalidad de pensamiento puede educarse y enriquecerse a lo largo de la vida) (Chappin, Bijvoet, & Oei, 2017), sería importante entonces preguntarse por las condiciones de intervención que se pueden llevar a cabo desde entornos educativos diversos, en diferentes etapas del desarrollo, para fomentar el APS que conlleve al empoderamiento y la acción social.…”