Sliced serious games: Conceptual approach towards environment-friendly mobility behavior

Abstract

This paper introduces the concept of Sliced Serious Games aiming to improve environment-friendly mobility behavior. The conceptual approach is motivated by two aspects: First, it is proven that Serious Games can help to learn or to change behavior in educational settings or games for health. Second, referring to climate and pollution, there is a strong need for environment-friendly mobility behavior. The basic idea is to combine both aspects and to provide a playful environment to support environment-friendly mobility behavior. Technically, the key challenge tackles the characteristics of intermodal mobility chains when people are moving from A to B with modality changes and short time frames to play. For that, the concept of Sliced Serious Games considers activity recognition to figure out which modalities are used, and makes use of gamification principles to motivate users to change their mobility behavior and to use environment-friendly modalities. Section 1 describes the intention of the approach and characterizes the overall research question, i.e. how to use serious games within intermodal mobility chains with changes among modalities and short time frames to play in a train, in a bus, tram, on a bicycle or during a walk. This leads to the concept of Sliced Serious Games being introduced in Sect. 2, considering related work and best practice examples. Section 3 describes two prototypes for Sliced Serious Games, ‘Smog’ and ‘Fred’. The main results are summarized in Sect. 4, also providing an outlook for future research.