Both bottom-up and top-down initiatives are essential for addressing climate change effectively. These include initiatives aiming to achieve widespread behavioral change towards reduction of greenhouse gas emissions as well as pursuing education regarding adaptation measures. While awareness of the issue of climate change is now pervasive, and actions are being taken at all levels of society, there is still much to do if international goals are to be met. Games and gamification offer one approach to foster both behavioral change and education. In this paper, we investigate the state-of-the-art of game-based climate change engagement through a systematic literature review of 64 research outputs comprising 56 different gamified approaches. Our analysis of the literature reveals a trend of promising findings in this nascent and growing area of research, suggesting the potential to impact multiple engagement dimensions simultaneously, as well as create an engaging gameful experience. Overall, the corpus appears to offer a fruitful balance in foci between climate science, mitigation, and adaptation, as well as a variety of formats in game-based approaches (i.e. digital, analog, and hybrid). However, shortcomings were also observed, such as geographic and demographic imbalances and the short duration of interventions. The reviewed studies yield a large number of results indicating climate change engagement through gamification, especially in the form of cognitive engagement, affect towards climate change-related topics, and in-game behavioral engagement with others. Nevertheless, heterogeneity in terms of contexts, designs, outcomes, and methods, as well as limited rigor in research designs and reporting, hinders drawing overall conclusions. Based on our review, we provide guidelines regarding contexts, interventions, results, and research quality and internal validity for advancing the space of game-based interventions for climate change engagement.

This paper examines the views of user experience (UX) professionals on the definitions of usability and UX, and compares the findings between countries and within different socio-cultural groups. A mixed-method analysis was employed on data gathered on 422 professionals through a survey in Turkey, Finland, Denmark, France, and Malaysia. Usability appears to be an established concept, respondents across all countries agreeing on the importance of the ISO 9241-11 definition. There is also a tendency that UX professionals attach organizational perspective to usability. UX professionals diverge when defining UX, and there are systematic differences related to socio-cultural conditions. UX professionals in Finland and France incline more towards the definition highlighting the experiential qualities, when compared to Turkey and Malaysia that incline towards the definition reflecting the ease of use, utility, attractiveness, and degree of usage. Further research should address the implications of the diverse meanings and contexts of usability and UX.

Engaging citizens with climate change is an urgent and complex issue. Gamified initiatives such as game-based learning are used to promote awareness, emotional connection, and action, but we would benefit from more examples of how players truly play serious games and learn through them, especially regarding climate change, which presents unique characteristics as a learning topic. Thus, we developed a digital game about climate change and pandemics and thematically analyzed 12 players’ experiences with it, including their relationship with the designed path, their possible deviations, and their engagement with the topic. Among our findings, we observe that progressing does not always involve interacting exactly as designed, and that game features that would be problematic otherwise can be accepted in the context of education. We also found that players may resist engaging in morally controversial in-game actions, give up in advance, or progress without understanding their actions’ meaning. They also take actions diverging from a purely learning-oriented purpose, such as talking to and trying to interact with characters. Furthermore, game-based climate change engagement is complex and transcends learning new information. The results imply that game-based learning experiences cannot be completely guided, but designers are encouraged to clarify instructions to avoid moments of confused progress. In addition, players can frame educational games as different from entertainment ones in, e.g., their acceptable text amount, but not necessarily in terms of playful affordances. Accessibility and transparency should be addressed too. Importantly, the pedagogical and engaging value of adding playful interactions allowing for player autonomy, surprise, and character attachment should be considered. These can support player engagement and therefore maximize the educational value of games. Regarding climate change, we provide cognitive, affective and behavioral implications, including a call for designs that consider player agency and context.

This paper reports the frontal electroencephalographic (EEG) alpha asymmetry, an index of approach/withdrawal motivation, during natural reading of a newspaper on the traditional print medium and a tablet computer. The moderating influences of dispositional behavioral activation system (BAS) and behavioral inhibition system (BIS) sensitivities, demographics, and reading style on frontal asymmetry were examined. Reading the print newspaper induced relatively greater left frontal cortical activation, suggesting higher approach motivation during reading on paper than on a tablet in the presence of moderating effects of personality, reading style, and level of experience with a tablet. In general, higher scores of Drive and Fun Seeking were associated with higher frontal asymmetry when reading on print than on a tablet. Reading style showed also a moderating effect on frontal EEG asymmetry; focused readers experienced greater approach motivation towards the print newspaper. A higher experience with a tablet predicted a lower approach motivation in the tablet reading condition than in the print reading condition. The results show that dispositional BAS sensitivities, reading style, and level of experience with a tablet have moderating influences on approach motivation elicited during reading on digital media, and thus, these human factors should be taken into account when designing interfaces for newspaper applications.