Can serious games help to mitigate climate change? Exploring their influence on Spanish and American teenagers’ attitudes / ¿Pueden los serious games ayudar a mitigar el cambio climático? Una exploración de su influencia sobre las actitudes de los adolescentes españoles y estadounidenses

Abstract

There is an urgent need to curb emissions and mitigate climate change, and this fight requires a change in teenagers’ attitudes. In search of new approaches targeting youth, online games are seen as a promising tool for communication and education. Using the serious game 2020 Energy as a case study, the main objective of this paper is to examine the influence of the game on Spanish and American teenagers’ attitudes (N = 108), employing a pretest-posttest design with an experimental condition (playing the game) and a control condition (not playing the game). Results show that there have not been statistically significant differences after playing the game, although when looking closer at each factor, some positive consequences can be found.