Serious Game for Human Environmental Consciousness Education in Residents Daily Life
This addresses the problem of low environmental awareness among residents by using gamification for education, though it is incremental as it applies existing game engine technology to a new domain.
The paper tackles the challenge of educating people on environmental consciousness by developing a serious game for residential home operation, where players earn points and rewards for making environmentally friendly choices to learn correct behaviors for reducing energy consumption and improving recycling.
It has been challenging to find ways to educate people to have better environmental consciousness. In some cases, people do not know what the right behaviors are to protect the environment. Game engine has been used in the AEC industry for visualization. However, it has barely been used in environmental consciousness education, for example, what operation can reduce building energy consumption, what items are recyclables. As social psychology studies show that video game can influence human behavior, a good designed game should provide the game player with right incentives and guide the users to make wiser choices for better environmental protection. This paper discussed a method to use serious game engines to educate the players the right actions that should be taken under in different scenarios. These actions in real life will results in a better environmental protection. The game proposed in this study is for residential home operation. Other scenarios such as restaurant operation, grocery store operations are discussed as expansion of this study. The game players points will be calculated based on their performance on different choices and when they surpass a certain level, different rewards will be gained in order for them to adjust their current living style. The purpose of the game is to raise the environmental consciousness among the game players and educate them the right actions they can make to better protect the environment while they are spending time on games.