Paper published on our game for climate change (PEAR) in Sustainability
Over the last few years, we developed Project PEAR at SUTD Game Lab. Project PEAR is a geolocation based augmented reality game that is aimed at educating the player on climate change as well as influence their behaviours. We just published a study in Sustainability on the effectiveness of this game. Read the full study here, and download the game here for free for iOS and Android.
Abstract:
While public awareness of climate change has grown over the years, many people still have misconceptions regarding effective individual environmental action. In this paper, we present a serious game called PEAR, developed using elements of geolocation and augmented reality (AR), aimed at increasing players’ awareness of climate change issues and propensity for effective sustainable behaviours. We conducted a study with participants who played the game, gauging their knowledge of and attitudes towards climate change issues before and after playing the game. Our results show that the game significantly improved participants’ knowledge on sustainability and climate-change-related issues, and that it also significantly improved their attitudes towards these topics, thus proving that serious games have the potential to impart knowledge and promote sustainable behaviours. Additionally, our results address the lack of empirical studies on the knowledge base of serious sustainability games by introducing methods of quantitatively analysing the effects of serious sustainability games while additionally providing more knowledge about the effectiveness of the specific design elements of our game