A survey of serious games on sustainable development

ABSTRACT

The continuing depletion of natural resources has become a major focus for the society at large. There is an increasing recognition of the need to sustain an ecologically-balanced environment, while, at the same time, exploring and exploiting the natural resources to satisfy the ever-increasing demands of the human race. A profound solution to this is the adoption of sustainable development practices. Increasing the awareness towards a more sustainable future is thus critical, and one way to achieve this is through the use of decision games called "serious games". Serious games are gaining in popularity as tools that add entertainment to teaching and training. In this paper we undertake a review of serious games on sustainable development with a view to facilitate the understanding of the issues around sustainability, to identify opportunities towards improving the feature-set of these games, and for enhancing knowledge around sustainable development strategies.

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Index Terms

• Applied computing

  • Computers in other domains

    • Personal computers and PC applications

      • Computer games

• Computing methodologies

  • Modeling and simulation

• General and reference

  • Document types

    • Surveys and overviews

• Information systems

  • Information systems applications

    • Multimedia information systems

      • Massively multiplayer online games

• Social and professional topics

  • Professional topics

    • Computing and business

• Software and its engineering

  • Software organization and properties

    • Contextual software domains

      • Virtual worlds software

        • Interactive games

• Theory of computation

  • Theory and algorithms for application domains

    • Algorithmic game theory and mechanism design