Playing Good? — Environmental Communication through Games and Simulations

Abstract

Game scenarios are increasingly being developed with an aim to influence people’s pro-environmental behaviour, by either changing their attitudes or their understanding of complex environmental phenomena. This chapter presents selected examples and analyses how they might affect people’s behaviour, mediated by psychological mechanisms presented in earlier chapters. The selected games are computer games, board games, and role plays. In this context, the importance of personal experience of environmental phenomena, behaviour related to them, and their consequences is summarised. Empirical evaluations of the games’ impact are presented. The second part of this chapter deals with conclusions about human behaviour based on the analysis of people’s behaviour in the so-called social dilemmas. The contribution of game theory to the analysis of human environmental behaviour is outlined and the potential of simulations based on game theory for learning pro-environmentalism is discussed as well as the limits of that approach.