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Content archived on 2023-04-13

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Energy’s got game

Saving the planet can mean saving money and having fun. This is not wishful thinking but a reality that is happening with gamification all over the world.

Playing games could be a solution to saving energy. Using energy more efficiently is, of course, a crucial part of fighting climate change, since oil and fossil fuels continue to be the most important energy source in the world, including Europe. Buildings are responsible for approximately 40% of energy consumption and 36% of CO2 emissions in the EU. By changing our daily behaviour, we could boost energy efficiency. Unfortunately, convincing people to abandon their habits is not easy, complains Bernard Tamain, a scientist and energy expert member of the NGO Save the Climate: “The heating of homes and workplaces should be reduced by limiting the temperature to 18°C, but I often hear people around me refuse to make this effort. We should travel by bike, by train or walk, but I often see parents, for example, use their car to pick up their children at school only 500 metres from home. We should take shorter showers, but I see that young people don’t do it.” The problem is not lack of knowledge: campaigns have been going on for years informing citizens. People just don’t feel at ease making sacrifices for the environment. But what if they did it for fun? Here is where games and gamification come into play. Educational games, of course, are not a new idea, but the rise of gaming for “social good” was largely influenced by a widely viewed TED talk that game designer and author Jane McGonigal gave in 2010 on how games can “save the world”. During her talk she insisted that by playing games, “We’re actually changing what we are capable of as human beings. We’re evolving to be a more collaborative and hearty species.” However, it has been pointed out that the so-called “serious games”, complete games in a closed virtual environment, have limits, in particular they do not necessarily make good habits become permanent. You play the game, you have fun for the time being, then you go back to your everyday life and nothing guarantees that in real life you will actually keep behaving the same way as in virtual reality. Gamification, on the other hand, is an altogether different story, since its aim is to bring the benefits of games into real life. People, for instance, can compete for the lowest energy consumption, and there might be rewards. A practical example is the San Diego Energy Challenge, a pilot programme in the US that was conducted in 2012 by San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E) and SimpleEnergy, an IT company specialised in energy savings. In this case, smart metres were used to engage customers by means of a friendly competition. By saving energy, households were able to win prizes for themselves – from tablets to gift cards – and for their favourite local middle school. The grand prize was 15,000 dollars. The status and points were displayed on a website. In Europe, more recently, a number of projects have been launched such as Virtual Energy Advisor, an app developed by the Catalan start-up Enerbyte. It allows users to compare their electricity consumption with that of their neighbours or of the previous year, thus providing an incentive to use energy more efficiently. But critics say that even gamification has often failed to deliver the expected results. According to Ashley Morton, researcher at De Montfort University, in Leicester, UK, “many of these apps are designed without taking into consideration who the user is or what they might want from the app or tool. Typically they target one user type or one building type, but one-size-fits-all solutions will not work.” She is part of the team working on the EU project eTEACHER, whose aim is to create an app, an ICT tool to encourage and enable building users to adopt more energy-efficient behaviour change, which includes gamification. Read the full article: http://www.eteacher-project.eu/energys-got-game/

Keywords

Energy, gamification, game, energy efficiency

Countries

Spain, United Kingdom, United States