How games based on personalised narratives might help in transitioning towards sustainable lifestyles?

I am exploring this question as a part of my PhD research at Intelligent Games and Games Intelligence (IGGI). Here’s a short tour d’horizon of what my research is going to be about.

Let’s start by looking at the terms games, personalised narratives and sustainable lifestyle independently.

The potential of games

“Games” is the buzzword of the 21st century; especially in the interactive media and entertainment industry. The gaming industry is booming and it is expected to rise up to $218.7 billion by the year 2024. However, games hold a latent potential of offering much more than just entertainment.

“Video games are bad for you? That’s what they said about Rock-n-Roll.”

Shigeru Miyamoto

Games provide immersive, safe and open environments that can foster curiosity and experimentation. The structure of games motivates their players to be their best selves while playing. It not only makes them accept failures but also convinces them to keep playing until they succeed. These attributes make games ideal for numerous applications in diverse domains such as learning, healthcare, assistive technology, habit forming and social change among many others.

Such ‘applied’ or ‘serious’ kinds of games, as they cater to niche domains, rarely scale up to become well known and popular (unlike their commercial counterparts). The constrained nature of applied games gives rise to debates like this about the research and design processes of games in the industry and academia. Despite the differences, there has been a significant increase in creation and dissemination of several purposeful games that are being created by numerous game research labs at various universities, game design studios as well as independent consultants like myself who are intrigued to fathom the potential of games in diverse domains.

The power of personalised narratives

“Humans think in stories, and we try to make sense of the world by telling stories.”

Yuval Noah Harari

We are shaped by the narratives that surround us and at the same time, we are shaping the narratives through our thoughts, behaviours and actions. Over the years, the medium of storytelling has evolved into many forms, yet stories continue to influence us in the exact same way as always.

Currently we stand at the juncture where the narrative medium is transforming from being a passive experience to an interactive and immersive platform. By empowering the audience to customise and personalise their own experience of the story, the interactive digital narrative format is reimagining the film and video content in the form of games. Games industry has experienced the rise and fall of a similar trend in the 90s via Full Motion Video (FMV) games. However, this time the future of interactive storytelling appears more promising due to the ongoing innovations in media technology.

The media research community has been experimenting with the power of the interactive narrative. Research is being conducted on whether and how the personalisation attribute of interactive narratives affects the audience’s engagement and empathy towards the content of the narrative. I find this confluence of narrative and games is immensely exciting to delve deeper into its impact on player’s behaviour in virtual as well as real world.

The challenge of encouraging sustainable lifestyles

Increasing number of people are becoming aware about the need for sustainability in order to experience fulfilling lives and conserve ecosystems for the future generations. Yet, many among them find it difficult to actually inculcate sustainable habits in their daily lives. The inclination towards adopting pro-environmental and sustainable behaviour often gets overshadowed by one’s immediate needs and desires.

Researchers working in the field of behaviour change have identified a range of barriers that hold us back from engaging in sustainable activities. According to them, the lack of visible connection between our everyday actions and their (local + global + short term + long term) impacts is one of them. It stops us from considering global problems (like climate change, pollution, poverty, hunger among many others) as immediate and urgent.

Good communication that relies on personal narratives has been found effective in encouraging sustainable behaviours. Still, making sustainable choices everyday is difficult. It’s easy to lapse into unsustainable practices. How can we solve this problem? Yuval Noah Harari in his book 21 Lessons for The 21st Century suggests that like money, government or democracy, the need for sustainability needs to become that story which all of us believe in.

“The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would suffice to solve most of the world’s problems.”

Mohandas K. Gandhi

How does it come together?

Through my research, I intend to design games that address the knowledge-action gap that hinders us from attaining and maintaining a sustainable lifestyle. I like to call these games ‘personalised data driven playable narratives’.

I am aware that a large number of games that cater to sustainability have already been designed. Although most of them belong to either the simplistic puzzle, quiz or simulation genres, they do provide helpful learning environments to develop mindsets of handling uncertainty and complexity of sustainability. Recent games ‘Eco’ and ‘World Rescue’ have followed a better approach to highlight the sustainability principle of systemic interconnectedness quite successfully. However, they still leave the design space open for games that make use of personalised narratives and are based on direct real-world scenarios.

My (current) hypothesis is that playing ‘rouge-like’ versions of one’s own everyday life events can help players to notice the everyday narratives that they have created for themselves while providing opportunities to reconstruct them, leading to an emergent behaviour change of transitioning towards sustainable lifestyles.

“The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller. The storyteller sets the vision, values and agenda of an entire generation that is to come.”

Steve Jobs

My evolving vision of research contributions:

On successful completion, I envision my research to deliver three contributions to the game design industry and research academia:

1. personalised story based game(s) related to everyday choices and actions
2. reflections on use of games as tools for behaviour change specifically in the domain of sustainable lifestyle transitions
3. insights on following participatory design process while creating interactive narratives and applied games

Thank you for reading!

I plan to keep updating this blog as I proceed with my research. If you are interested in my work, you may connect with me here.

About IGGI:

IGGI is a unique PhD research programme that hosts a broad range of games research areas which include Applied Games, Player Research, Game Data, Game AI, Creative Computing, E-Sports, Immersive Technology, Game Audio, Design and Development, Accessibility, Game Business. To know more about the research projects at IGGI, do check: https://iggi.org.uk/research