Sustainable Sip: Learning Concepts Of Business Sustainability Through A Hybrid Game

Abstract

We present Sustainable Sip, a hybrid multiplayer round-based game designed to provide an experiential learning environment for university-level students at the University of Queensland, Australia. It aims to facilitate literacy around the fundamental concepts of business sustainability, specifically the tensions and interplay between economics and sustainability, and systems thinking. This paper represents stage 1 of this project (design, development, testing). Impact assessment will be covered by stage 2 (application), which is outside the scope of this paper. Each player manages a coffee shop in a competitive market, seeking to maximise their customer base, whilst minimising the production of waste (unsold coffee tokens). Each round, players must decide how much coffee (inventory) to buy from the wholesaler, and the price to sell coffee to customers. Players aim to balance the dimensions of economic performance, environmental sustainability, and customer loyalty; the player that best achieves this wins the ‘Sustainable Sipper’ award. ‘Customer loyalty’ is a central concept, calculated in the app for each player and is influenced by the shop’s coffee price, quantity of waste the shop produces, and a player’s ability to meet customer demand. The game design explicitly draws from system thinking, user-centred and hybrid design, and from self-determination theory (motivation). Sustainable Sip has undergone early testing with preliminary feedback highlighting that the gameplay is simple, intuitive and interactive, aspects that are attributable in part to the game design and the hybrid approach.