The Application of Games to Engage Citizens in Climate Change Policy Development

This paper introduces the Games Realising Effective and Affective Transformation (GREAT) research and Innovation project. The project will examine the emerging ways Applied Games could be used to facilitate the social engagement of European citizens in determining future policy priorities and policy interventions to the existential challenge of climate change. This full paper is a combination of ‘work in progress’ and a conceptual analysis of methodologies applied to this emerging domain of study.

The project is funded by the EU Horizon programme with UK Associate partners funded through UKRI and coordinated by the DIPF, Leibniz Institute for Research and Information in Education, Frankfurt and involves seven partners located across Europe, Serious Games Interactive (SGI) Denmark, Centre for Social Innovation (ZSI) Austria, International University of Rioja (UNIR) Spain, Frederick University, Cyprus, Playmob and The University of Bolton (UoB) as UK associate partners.

The project incorporates collaborative design and citizen science methods and brings together researchers with expertise in the areas of games, data analytics, and policy development. This integrated investigation will be articulated by case studies of the use of games in facilitating dialogue between citizens and policy stakeholders including policy makers, policy implementers, political parties, campaigning organisations and affected citizens. This will be achieved by leveraging the central role of games in contemporary culture by combining academic studies with practical experimentation of novel applications of games. The context for the research is the global challenge of climate emergency, and each case study incorporates a research cycle addressing a policy issue and research questions, using multiple pilots to generate both quantitative and qualitative and data to further inform research activity.

An important aspect of the method is to place games in authentic contexts, so that players are aware that their activities have real-world implications, and to close the loop with an inclusive approach to interactions with policy stakeholders. Agile methods are deployed in adapting games from existing platforms, for use as research tools including short games at scale in successful mobile games to generate quantitative data aiming to target 3 million players and secondly longer collaborative games focussed on social dilemmas with small groups to generate in-depth qualitative data.

This paper introduces the Games Realising Effective and Affective Transformation (GREAT) research and Innovation project. The project will examine the emerging ways Applied Games could be used to facilitate the social engagement of European citizens in determining future policy priorities and policy interventions to the existential challenge of climate change. This full paper is a combination of ‘work in progress’ and a conceptual analysis of methodologies applied to this emerging domain of study.

The project is funded by the EU Horizon programme with UK Associate partners funded through UKRI and coordinated by the DIPF, Leibniz Institute for Research and Information in Education, Frankfurt and involves seven partners located across Europe, Serious Games Interactive (SGI) Denmark, Centre for Social Innovation (ZSI) Austria, International University of Rioja (UNIR) Spain, Frederick University, Cyprus, Playmob and The University of Bolton (UoB) as UK associate partners.

The project incorporates collaborative design and citizen science methods and brings together researchers with expertise in the areas of games, data analytics, and policy development. This integrated investigation will be articulated by case studies of the use of games in facilitating dialogue between citizens and policy stakeholders including policy makers, policy implementers, political parties, campaigning organisations and affected citizens. This will be achieved by leveraging the central role of games in contemporary culture by combining academic studies with practical experimentation of novel applications of games. The context for the research is the global challenge of climate emergency, and each case study incorporates a research cycle addressing a policy issue and research questions, using multiple pilots to generate both quantitative and qualitative and data to further inform research activity.

An important aspect of the method is to place games in authentic contexts, so that players are aware that their activities have real-world implications, and to close the loop with an inclusive approach to interactions with policy stakeholders. Agile methods are deployed in adapting games from existing platforms, for use as research tools including short games at scale in successful mobile games to generate quantitative data aiming to target 3 million players and secondly longer collaborative games focussed on social dilemmas with small groups to generate in-depth qualitative data.