Learning principles and interaction design for ‘Green My Place’: A massively multiplayer serious game

Entertainment Computing 2 (2011) 103–113

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Learning principles and interaction design for ‘Green My Place’: A massively multiplayer serious game Ben Cowley a,⇑, Jose Luiz Moutinho b, Chris Bateman c, Alvaro Oliveira b a

Center for Knowledge and Innovation Research, Aalto Yliopisto, Helsinki, P.O. Box 21250, 00076 Aalto, Finland Alfamicro Lda, Alameda da Guia N°192A, 2750-368 Cascais, Portugal c International Hobo Ltd., 8 Milton Road, Manchester M32 0RD, United Kingdom b

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history: Received 6 September 2010 Revised 26 December 2010 Accepted 6 January 2011 Available online 20 January 2011 Keywords: Serious games Game design Pedagogical principles Energy efficiency Behavlet

a b s t r a c t The usual approach to serious game design is to construct a single game intended to address the specific domain problem being addressed. This paper describes a novel alternative approach, focussed on embedding smaller game elements into a comprehensive framework, which provides stronger motive for play and thus greater chance of effect. This serious game design methodology was developed for an EU project to teach energy efficient knowledge and behaviour to users of public buildings around Europe. The successful implementation of this game is also described. The cutting-edge educational principles that formed the basis for the design are drawn from recent research in serious games and energy efficiency, and include the Behavlet, a novel behaviour-transformation concept developed by the authors. The game design framework presented illustrates a clear approach for serious games dealing with topics applicable at societal scales. Ó 2011 International Federation for Information Processing Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction The award-winning1 serious game Green My Place is the keystone in the user interface of the SAVE ENERGY European Project (CIP-ICTPSP-238882 PROJECT).2 SAVE ENERGY addresses the challenge of behaviour transformation through the use of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) to enable of energy efficiency in five public buildings in five European cities – Helsinki, Leiden, Lisbon, Luleå and Manchester. Green My Place3 is a serious game aimed at achieving behaviour transformation in energy awareness. It takes the form of a massively multiplayer online (MMO) game played within a WWW-browser. Each of the five different building locations around Europe is instantiated as a team in the game, and they compete over 1 year to become the most energy efficient. Each building has been equipped with real-world energy sensors to measure energy use – and this monitoring is the main source for scoring of each team. Additionally, players play simple, fast eco-action based mini-games, take quizzes and learn about energy efficiency from sources on the web. The actions of a team of players combine to win awards that improve and

⇑ Corresponding author. Tel.: +358 403538339; fax: +358 943138391. E-mail address: ben.cowley@aalto.fi (B. Cowley). First ‘European Best Learning Game Competition’, first place prize in the category ‘best non-professional functional game’. 2 For more on SAVE ENERGY, see http://www.ict4saveenergy.eu. 3 To access Green My Place, go to http://greenmyplace.net. 1

upgrade the virtual representation of their team building. In this way, the five teams compete for 1 year to Green their place. This paper describes the functional structure of the game, illustrating the pedagogical principles that drove each design decision with clear examples of instantiated game mechanics or information design. Such an approach is motivated by the perceived lack of clear guidelines in the literature on how to take the best concepts and research of the educational science field, and apply them in a game development process [1]. Game design is practiced very often more as an art than a science [2,3] and even though the designer’s skills must include a creative flair that cannot be replaced by a scientific process, there is nevertheless room for development and application of soundly research-based methodologies. This is especially so in the field of serious games, where the duties of a game are doubled – entertainment and engagement must be paired with effective pedagogical design and behaviour change. A gainful parallel can be made with educational books: there is certainly an artistic element to their construction, and factoring this out would render such a book dry and ineffective. But artistic elements must integrate with solid educational principles if the book is going to serve its purpose. Thus our paper lays out the pedagogical and behaviour change research that was used to address the behaviour change challenge of the SAVE ENERGY project, and provide a case-by-case illustration of how such research can be instantiated as a released product. In the next section we describe the project requirements and the pedagogical principles used to meet them, principles which were

1875-9521/$ - see front matter Ó 2011 International Federation for Information Processing Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.entcom.2011.01.001

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taken from the literature on serious game design. Then Sections 3– 5 illustrate the mapping between pedagogical principles and the game design elements created for Green My Place. This is ordered following the principal areas of the game design – 3: modes of play, 4: social information architecture and 5: pedagogical interaction loop. Finally, in Section 6 we give our conclusions and future directions. 2. SAVE ENERGY project Information and communication technologies (ICT) are recognized as enablers for economic growth and higher energy efficiency. The main objective of the SAVE ENERGY project is to make use of ICT to transform the behaviour of users of public buildings regarding energy efficiency, through serious games and real-time information from sensors and actuators. SAVE ENERGY is building upon the Living Labs methodology [4] to provide an engaging virtual environment for users, citizens and policy makers to gain awareness, understanding and experience associated with energy saving attitudes. In order to achieve the project objectives, the game had to meet the following requirements and constraints. 1. Targeting 20% reduction in energy use attributable to SAVE ENERGY – the project goals are shown below in Fig. 1. 2. Achieve targets with 1 year of exposure of audience to game – the project contract demanded that the test phase for the developed game be of ‘sufficient duration’. 3. Utilise real-time energy monitoring data from the pilot buildings. 4. Integrate the game with real-time energy management (EM) and information-display (RTI) systems. 5. Deploy the same system across five different pre-defined audiences (both adult and young people) in five pilot buildings, in five different cities across Europe with five different languages. 6. Modest development resources (time was constrained by a fixed launch date, and budget and even types of employees that could be hired were constrained). Additional to requirements, there are numerous pitfalls that serious games often fall into, the most common of which are as follows:  Assuming that a serious game must be a simulation: This is a costly error! Simulation games are time consuming to develop and only about 10% of the population are able to enjoy them [5]. In some cases, a detailed simulation might be the best solution (for instance, if one is training engineers, there is a high likelihood that the target audience will enjoy a simulation

Fig. 1. Cumulative energy saving targets within the SAVE ENERGY project.

game). For most serious games projects, the draw towards simulation represents a pre-existing bias in the research community, which skews heavily towards the kind of psychological profile associated with enjoyment of simulation games.  Presupposing what makes a ‘‘good game’’: Many people in digital game development, and in the audience for digital games, are often misled by rigid assumptions as to what constitutes ‘‘a good game’’. Pragmatically, just as a ‘‘good book’’ is defined by its ability to satisfy its audience, a ‘‘good game’’ is a game that satisfies its audience [5]. Thus, responsible commercial, educational, political or otherwise purpose-motivated game design should always begin with a determination of the target audience. Only in artistically or personally motivated game design is this consideration irrelevant.  Considering simplistic games to be inappropriate: Because ‘‘serious games’’ implies a solemn intent, there is a tendency to believe that a serious game must also be soberly constructed. Yet the games that the majority of players enjoy are frivolous and lightweight. It is important to understand that a frivolous game can nonetheless educate on a serious matter. In fact, in terms of the widest possible audience for a game, frivolity offers significantly greater appeal than solemnity in almost every instance. In preparing to meet these requirements while obeying the constraints and avoiding pitfalls, we went to the literature to discover the state of the art in serious game-based learning, and extract principles which could be applied. 2.1. Literature for serious game development The literature from which we drew4 can be broken in three broad categories. These are game design for targeted demographics; serious game design; and methods to effect change in energy-use behaviour. Commercial game design, if it is to be responsible, must be targeted at specific demographics. This observation, which game designer Sheri Graner Ray has suggested is ‘‘marketing 101’’ [6], and therefore should be uncontroversial, remains something of a surprise for a great many individuals working in the digital games industry, where a widespread faith in personal intuition with regards game design frequently occludes commercial reality. Manufactured products – of all kinds, including those with artistic elements such as feature films, television programs, and digital games – are produced at significant cost for sale to an audience with the intent that the revenue generated will at least equal and hopefully exceed the cost of manufacture. Bateman and Boon have termed this form of game creation ‘‘demographic game design’’ [5], and have explored a number of possible psychological models for considering the target audience beyond the usual marketing categories of gender, age, income generated, etc. Their key observation, however, is that no single model will suffice in all cases, and that it is the central nature of a model that ‘‘the map is not the territory’’, in Alfred Korzybski’s memorable phrase [7]. In other words, purpose-motivated game design must establish the available and suitable models that can inform game design as part of the research or pre-development phase of any project. In the absence of such groundings, the money invested in development is effectively being gambled. (Practically, all commercial developed entails such a risk, but the management of risk is central to sound business practice, and thus demographic 4 Practically speaking, studying game design must include the experience and understanding of the design practitioners. These are not publishing academics, thus the literature we use contains non-peer reviewed sources such as video talks and blogs.

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research should possess a key role in the risk management practices of digital game development.) Serious game design must meet the needs of ordinary game design (entertainment) and at the same time incorporate another, apparently incompatible, need – to educate and change the player. In [1], Gee describes 39 principles of game design that enable learning – some or all of these can be found in almost any (well-designed) game, but exposing their mechanism is particularly useful for creating ‘edutainment’. A veteran commercial game designer, Noah Falstein currently works principally in serious games, and illustrates his approach to serious games design in [8,9]. A basic introduction to the concept of behavioural game design is given by [10]; that is, games designed around the principles of behaviourist psychology [11]. This illustrates how games can actually be used to change the behaviour of players in the long term (non-specific to any domain of behaviour). However, game designers using behaviourist principles should proceed with some caution when applied in the context of educational software, since over-justification effects can have confounding influence on the desired behavioural changes. In terms of efficiency of energy-use behaviour, intervention studies have been carried out in many parts of the world. Abrahamse et al. [12] and Darby [13] have reviewed a substantial

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number of interventions, while [14] extracts the policy lessons from a substantial literature review. Notable single studies for the purposes of SAVE ENERGY include [15–17]. Finally, a new concept developed for this project is the Behavlet [18], which represents a critical incident of energy-use behaviour that can influence a situation toward greater energy efficiency. Each Behavlet specifies how individual behaviour can be more or less energy efficient in a particular scenario. Although there is much more literature that could be useful for our purpose, this is not solely intended as a review paper and to service brevity we only include the sources which were most influential for our final game design. 2.2. Defined solutions for the project The literature above gave us the core pedagogical principles which, after incorporation as elements of a cohesive game design, were developed into a TEL product to meet the project goals. Table 1 presents a simple matching of project requirements (in rows shaded grey) to principles/design elements (numbered in the left column). The most important effects of interactions between each design element are also discussed, as the whole is often something other than the sum of its parts.

Table 1 List of requirements and matching principles, numbered on the left. Targeting 20% reduction in energy use attributable to SAVE ENERGY: Literature reviews identified multiple effective interventions (in bold) – from which we chose both antecedent strategies (1–3) and consequence strategies (4–5) 1 2

3 4 5 6 7

Appropriate goals principle: set a goal for energy reduction – see Fig. 1 (difficult goals seem more effective [13]) Tailored information principle: disseminate about energy-related problems (general) or possible solutions (specific) – tailored to the individual teams to be more effective Gee [1] describes the pedagogical efficacy of the ‘semiotic’ and ‘semiotic domains’ principles in games. Constructing a system of signs in the space of energy efficiency is helped by its thematic unity, but hindered by the technical comprehension required Modelling principle: model target groups to identify relevant solutions Feedback principle: periodic (daily, weekly, monthly) and comparative The ‘achievement principle’ [1], which means rewards: here, in the form of instantiated tokens of serious game success Ehrhardt-Martinez [15] describes how the principle of social norms is useful to influence people by exploiting their natural inclination to conform to the perception of ‘socially appropriate’ behaviour i.e. intervene by giving feedback on energy saving behaviour of neighbours and/or other closely related groups Complementarity principle: ‘‘Complementary interventions that work at multiple levels are generally seen as being the most effective in bringing about behaviour change’’ ibid. This is also the mechanic behind the ‘multiple routes principle’ [1]

Achieve targets with 1 year of exposure of audience to game: 8 For a game design that can engage players for up to 1 year,a we looked to the concepts from social online gaming [20], to create what [1] calls the ‘affinity group’ principleb (alongside the ‘distributed principle’, ‘dispersed principle’ and ‘insider principle’) Utilise real-time energy monitoring data from the pilot buildings: 9 This is a direct feedback mechanism which is cited as highly effective in [16] among others. However, real-time energy monitoring data can be very complex and technical. Much of game design is about hiding the complexity of a system and revealing only what is needed, when it is needed – what [1] calls the ‘explicit information on-demand and just in time’ principle Integrate the game with real-time energy management and information-display systems: 10 In design terms, this requirement is really just an extension of nine above, and is also covered by the principle of ‘explicit information on-demand and just in time’ [1]. Players should be faced with a deep, not broad, system – they should be able to delve into it when they want from a simple beginning, not be forced to absorb great detail just to beginc Deploy the same system across five different pre-defined audiences (both adult and young people) in five pilot buildings, in five different cities across Europe with five different languages: 11 Mass market target audience – unless there is a known strong likelihood of selection bias in the audience, it can be assumed from the central limit theorem that the target audience is a typical mass market audience. While many games create their own selection bias thematically, as their themes shape the experience of play, a serious game should give no intrinsic reason to cause audience self-selection bias because the designer is free to create modes of play that are widely appealingd 12 Including the ‘identity principle’ [1] should permit some bridging of the gap between players in different locations, age groups and levels of responsibility (for energy use) Modest development resources (time was constrained by a fixed launch date, and budget and level of experience of employees that could be hired were constrained): 13 ‘‘Start in the middle’’ [9] – Falstein expressed the idea that game development for small inexperienced teams should start development work on a part of the game that is least important – the middle. As experience helps to develop skill, the team’s work improves and the more important parts of the game – beginning and end – benefit a Creating a permanent behaviour change requires long-term exposure to the driver for change, that is, subjects should be given at least one year of the intervention to have a good chance that the ‘alternative’ behaviours of the intervention will become the norm. b Naturally, the ‘committed learning principle’ and ‘practice principle’ from [1] are important here. c Additionally, the ‘psycho-social moratorium principle’ is important here: only players whose real-world job it is to deal with real energy management systems are actually responsible, and all players see their outputs and are affected but only in the psycho-social moratorium of the game. d In the context of a mass market serious game, the target audience is demographically diverse in terms of conventional demography, and the most tenable audience model is probably that of the audience for ‘‘casual games’’ i.e. maximal inclusiveness via accessible, short-interval games requiring minimal introduction.

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3. From principles to practical game design The pragmatic approach of Green My Place to the principles described is listed below. Three main areas stand out – the major minor/modes of play, the social information architecture, and the pedagogical interaction loop. 3.1. Modes of play In order to serve the requirement of behavioural change, the game needed one or more modes of play that integrated the principles we found. Our modes of play began to form first from the intervention strategies in the energy efficiency literature: Principle 1 Appropriate goals principle (for energy reduction). In a game it is easy to set a fixed goal – you must rescue the Princess, you must collect 100 stars – however fixed goals require exhaustive fine-tuning of the entire lifespan of gameplay. Since our game was also required to last for a year the testing required was simply unachievable. In the context of five pilots, a better option was a competitive goal. Within a fixed gameplay timespan the pilot teams are challenged to compete to be the best energy-savers. This allows the game to remain constantly challenging without prior fine-tuning of the playable lifespan. It also provides motivation through the social challenge, as per [16]. Principle 1 Modelling principle (of target groups to show relevant solutions). The game has a target audience (in priority order): a. Pilot building users: citizen, public servant, policy maker. b. Non-users directly linked to pilot, e.g. school parents, families. c. General public in pilot building local area. All these disparate types of players could be linked together by the competition framework, through shared loyalty to their team, but the wide range of play preferences would not be well served by a single gameplay format. To service the audience, a modular model of gameplay was proposed, to be implemented through a series of mini-games embedded in the year-long competition. The advantages of the mini-game format included (i) shorter development cycle (ii) greater diversity of play content, to appeal to wider audience of mass market players (iii) tighter design focus to aid in integration with pedagogical goals. Principle 1 Achievement principle (rewards). In the context of a Europe-wide competition, the reward factor for energy-saving in the team building could be combined with the reward for simply playing games. That allows the player to gain some measure of positive personal feedback when their building is doing well, even though they may be very far removed from the important energy saving decisions (which in public buildings are mainly made by a few technicians, a significant problem for this project). Thus we aim to achieve behavioural change by maintaining the presence of the game in the player’s consciousness for as long as possible, without impeding their daily routine. This is a slow burn experience following the design for a massively social online game, or MSO [20], and takes the form of short duration educational ‘‘energy challenge’’ mini-games embedded in the ongoing social ‘‘Euro Team’’ meta-game. Principle 1 Affinity group. From principle 8 above we pick ‘affinity group’ as the most important, but the MSO format serves the other principles mentioned as well. On top of this, the minigames and other content within the meta-game framework are not just to be released willy–nilly. A schedule dictates the

release of a new mini-game or other activity content each week. With a timeline, and a scoring mechanism linked to it, the game promotes more of a sense of joining an event than a club. Like reality TV, the anticipation of an eventual resolution encourages players to stay involved, rather than being initially motivated and then losing interest. Principle 1 Start in the middle. With a modular game-play system based on a framework around a number of mini-games, the development process could afford to be very rapidly iterative, risk-taking and exploratory. Work begun on one prototype could be left aside and restarted after more relevant experience was gathered in another prototype. With a core mode of play in place, based on an MSO/mini-game design, it was then necessary to specify how players would learn. The play modes provide engagement and motivation, but the serious aspect of the game required dissemination of quite a lot of information from the personal – energy monitoring data – to general-purpose solutions to energy-waste problems. So next we move to the second primary area of the design, the social information architecture.

4. Social information architecture To implement the tailored information principle 2, and disseminate information about energy-related problems and solutions, was a challenge of logistics and motivation. The former was due largely to the widely international audience. The latter, as hinted at in the principle description above, was because the material to be disseminated can be quite dry and technical and far removed from the daily experience of the player. Our solution was not to dress up the material, but rather to structure the data according to principle 9, 10 of ‘explicit information on-demand and just in time’ [1], and raise the motivational stakes for players by integrated use of social media. This social forum (along with the competitive meta-game already described) also helps to implement principles 4 and 6: giving Feedback and utilising social norms. These principles come together in the display of Energy Saving percentage (ES%) for each team, as pictured in Fig. 2, which also shows how the rank of each team in their ES% for that week translates into points. Thus we display the simplest possible schematic of current energy savings prominently in the team pages, and provide access to deeper and more detailed information on energy use within the pedagogical interaction loop described below (via the Learn More pages, see Section 5). By doing so we put energy saving, the focal concept in the behaviour to be changed, front and centre. Less key information is withheld to an ‘on-demand only’ area of the site, where players can access the real-time energy monitoring information from the pilot buildings, on specially designed websites. One of the main challenges related to dissemination in the SAVE ENERGY project was the integration of a diverse set of contents and services within the context of the behaviour transformation for energy efficiency in public buildings. Applying existing ICT-based solutions alone, specifically real-time information from building management systems and serious games, would probably not have let the project consortium achieve the expected results if a usercentric, interactive approach was not in place. In that regard, new developments like social networking, micro-blogging, video sharing, social bookmarking, etc. must be considered key drivers for attracting and retaining an ever-growing number of user communities. Moreover, these user communities will be the start point of all dissemination. Therefore, the SAVE ENERGY project developed a comprehensive, albeit simple, social information architecture to cope with the challenge of content and service integration – this is described by Fig. 3 below.

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Fig. 2. The Green My Place portal, showing the particular screen that displays a Team’s ES%. This is calculated by comparing current consumption against reference data from before the project began. ES% relative to other teams determines a team points bonus.

Fig. 3. SAVE ENERGY social information architecture.

SAVE ENERGY’s social information architecture is composed of three core building blocks: SAVE ENERGY Services, SAVE ENERGY Communication Platform, and Web 2.0 Tools. The first block, SAVE ENERGY Services, is composed of the Green My Place portal with several mini-games, quizzes, real-time information and the SAVE ENERGY pilot buildings, which compete to be more energy efficient via the Green My Place meta-game. The second block, SAVE ENERGY Communication Platform, comprises the community portal, SAVE ENERGY communities, and the SAVE ENERGY portal which is linked to the SAVE ENERGY Central Services. The third block com-

bines several Web 2.0 tools. All these blocks are user-centric, meaning that all the data, information and knowledge produced is oriented towards behaviour transformation for energy efficiency in public buildings. 4.1. User interaction workflow The main entrance for the SAVE ENERGY services is the Green My Place portal. There the pilot buildings are represented as competing teams and the user will support a team not only by playing

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mini-games but also taking quizzes, seeing ‘learn-more’ information pages about energy efficiency, and getting feedback in the form of real-time information about energy consumption in each one of the pilots. Relevant data will be syndicated (made available to multiple other sites) using most popular Web 2.0 tools. The Green My Place portal is closely linked to the SAVE ENERGY communication platform which will also aggregate content from the Web 2.0 tools. This workflow is schematically described in Fig. 4 below. The SAVE ENERGY communication platform is a dual platform composed of a community portal, where user generated content and user participation through viral marketing is the key dissemination driver, and the project website, which aims to broadcast institutional information about the SAVE ENERGY portal. The mechanisms through which the SAVE ENERGY social information

architecture works are better explained by the use cases described in Table 2. The syndication process leads naturally to the achievement of the social norms principle, while the effect of this structure when trying to give feedback to players is to compound the normal impact of feedback by giving it also the recognition of the player’s community. The previous two sections have described two separate perspectives on the game design – as a procedural experience and as a social experience – serving complementary functions. Finally, we bring the focus onto the learning experience in the next section. 5. Pedagogical interaction loop An issue with the design as described so far is that it lacks a key instructional component – the repetition of task-based interaction with material to be learned, something like the ‘probing principle’ of [1]. Mini-games need to be short and novel which makes it difficult to repeat an instructional element often enough. This limitation is worst if the instructed concepts are linked together solely through the mini-games, since they should also be entertaining. Our design worked around this using what we call the pedagogical interaction loop. 5.1. Elements of the loop

Fig. 4. User interaction workflow with the Serious Game Web portal.

Table 2 Examples of SAVE ENERGY social information architecture use cases. 1

Mini-games and Twitter

2

Quizzes and Facebook, Wikipedia, Slideshare

3

Real-Time Information and Scribd

4

Testimonies and YouTube

5

Web 2.0 Tools aggregation in the SAVE ENERGY Portal

6

SAVE ENERGY Pilots and Flickr

7

SAVE ENERGY Pilots and Facebook

The mini-games will syndicate to Twitter the players’ results together with limited, consensual information about the user At the very end of each quiz there will be links to specific presentations uploaded to Slideshare or Wikipedia pages with more information about the subject. Some quizzes will be made available in Facebook, where people can share, discuss and vote the scores User-friendly technical information about real-time information indicators and graphics will be made available at Scribd Game players will be invited to videoblog on YouTube their experiences and ideas related to the subject of the mini-games Streams of Web 2.0 contents will be aggregated at the SAVE ENERGY portal, which will present an integrated view of the Web 2.0 tools. Users will be invited to share pictures at Flickr with examples of energy waste in public buildings, namely the SAVE ENERGY Pilots, followed by ideas about how to deal with the situations identified in the pictures Each pilot will have a fan page for people to follow and send tips, comments and suggestion on how to save energy in public buildings

Desktop research and interviews were conducted by the SAVE ENERGY consortium to identify critical incidents in terms of energy efficiency behaviour concerning work places (e.g. unplugging any electrical device that’s not being used). These critical incidents are in fact basic actions that people could perform to affect directly or indirectly the building’s energy consumption. Building upon these critical incidents, the concept of Behavlet was developed to represent a unit of behaviour transformation structured around actions, resources and outcomes – plus the most important contextual information. The idea behind the Behavlet concept is to identify the means for making behaviour transformation possible in a context, through a loosely-coupled collection of simple, objective and measurable patterns to save energy. This language of patterns [21] not only makes it easier to understand the real issues, but, most important of all, makes it natural to share new knowledge. Thus the real target group for Behavlets are those who are interested in spreading the energy-efficiency message, whether they are developers of ICT solutions or key users. The Behavlet patterns are intended to be schematic so that the instantiation for a user can take more than one form. Within the SAVE ENERGY project the instantiation takes the form of linked components within the serious game, which helps to bridge the gap between the requirement to address a serious topic and the requirement for some frivolity to help create fun. In terms of the serious game, the main objective of the Behavlets is to address the challenge to close the attitude–behaviour gap between the awareness that energy waste is a problem and behavioural transformation to reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. 1. The Behavlet system is composed of three different levels: 2. In the first level, resources, actions and outcomes are specified. 3. In the second level, the first level components are assembled in a Behavlet along with contextually-relevant information and an instrument to help consolidate behaviour transformation. 4. The third level represents the groups of several relevant Behavlets in the context of a generic virtual environment related to the five pilots.

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5.2. Resource–action–outcome The core of a Behavlet is built from discrete components composed of a resource, in general some energy-using equipment (e.g. mobile charger), which is linked with an action (e.g. unplug the mobile charger when not in use vs. leave the mobile charger plugged in even when not being used) to produce some expected outcome (20–25% energy savings). This system is shown below in Fig. 5. To obtain the resource and action definition in the project, the critical incidents and energy audits in each pilot illustrate some of the conditions of the pilot, namely building envelope, occupancy and functions, and point out the mix of resources on each Behavlet. On the other hand, in a general situation the known or expected behaviour patterns from best practices, literature or direct observation feed the range of resources, and actions which users can perform to change the status of the resource. The outcome will be compared with energy consumption data and will be the basic building blocks of behaviour transformation. 5.3. Individual Behavlet To obtain an individual Behavlet, the resource–action–outcome triplet is combined with several modifiers that help contextualise and display, plus an instrument which helps to consolidate the behaviour change with the user. This could be a single question to be added to a quiz, for example. Finally, the Behavlet carries a weight, which allows it to specify its own importance with respect to other Behavlets. Components of a Behavlet are thus: 1. Resource–action–outcome triplet (defined above). 2. Location modifier: specifies where the Behavlet is relevant, for instance car-space heaters are generally only used in countries with significant snowfall. 3. Season modifier: specifies when the Behavlet is relevant, for instance car-space heaters are generally only used in winter. 4. Language modifier: because this is a user-centred approach, it is important to communicate clearly. This could be an extra set of instructions to translators, for instance, to emphasise the key message so that interpretive translation can be done. 5. Consolidation instrument: the concepts of behaviour change can be complex – thus it is prudent to include a task or challenge that requires the user to comprehend the Behavlet. Within the SAVE ENERGY serious game design, this is instantiated as a

Fig. 5. Schema of Behavlet architecture.

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question to include in a quiz. The optional consolidation instrument provides closure for the user, in that once they master this, they can be said to have internalised the Behavlet. 6. Weight: it can be useful for development to directly specify the importance of the Behavlet. This can usually be derived from the literature or the expected outcome. 5.4. Behavlet group The third level is when several Behavlets are grouped to create an interactive experience for the user. The reason for this level is that a single Behavlet may not be all that engaging to the user, due to its simplicity. It is non-trivial to create the Behavlet, but learning about a simple concept like unplugging a charger can be done very quickly. The problem is that it is counter-productive to learn these concepts quickly, since behaviour change requires a long period of exposure before it is habituated. To expose the user to a Behavlet over a long period, it is good to package several together into an interactive experience. The experience is not just a single engaging product, however, but a product with pre- and post-use extras linking the engagement to realworld data and personal solutions. Thus we address principle 7 with the complementarity of interventions. In the case of the SAVE ENERGY serious game the engaging product is a Flash-format minigame, and the extras are an information screen containing realworld information (thus meeting requirement 4: integration with RTI and EM systems), plus a quiz to test the user on all the aspects in the experience. A more detailed example is described in the next section. To summarise, Behavlets are designed to provide a conceptual foundation on which to build a behaviour-changing interaction linking the virtual to the real. In the virtual, the user receives instant feedback from all actions that are explicitly linked to the internal variables, and related by example to external variables in the real. Based on that information, the user can influence the virtual system by changing some of the parameters of his actions. Ongoing real-world monitoring can show the comparable effects of behaviour change in the evolving values of key performance indicators. 5.5. Behavlets in Green My Place, the SAVE ENERGY serious game Aside from indirect measurement through electrical metering in the real environment, the project relies on the game to determine the engagement of the users, and measure their behaviour transformation. The Green My Place meta-game uses the key performance indicators to reflect users’ energy savings efforts in the overall status/consumption of each one of the pilot virtual environments. To drive the behaviour change process, the game makes use of an engagement loop as illustrated in Fig. 6, with Behavlets at the core to provide grounding in reality. The main providers of engagement are the mini-games, and that engagement is leveraged to drive players onto the Learn More screen. Here, they may link to the RTI systems provided by the team buildings – a direct link to the measurement of the real energy flowing through the building. Additionally, the Learn More screen contains items of knowledge retrieved automatically from a repository based on their closeness to the Behavlets in the mini-game just played. For instance, a game about lighting issues could trigger knowledge items about LED vs. incandescent light bulbs. This helps to situate the mechanics of the game in reality, what is called the ‘situated meaning principle’ in [1], without drowning the player in hard detail (the knowledge item links to further detail on the web), to suit the ‘subset principle’ ibid. The mini-games make use of the Behavlet concept to aggregate a set of patterns (e.g. turning off the lights or closing water taps)

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Fig. 6. The schematic specification of the Behavlets in the Green My Place game.

applicable to a specific situation within the context of the workplace. In fact, the mini-games are instrumental to make the energy saving patterns understandable and repeatable to the user until they achieve behaviour transformation. The mini-games are then linked to each one of the pilots by assembling the most relevant patterns (indentified by the relevant stakeholder) into one or more Behavlet sets (collection of Behavlets). The system by which a mini-game is constructed with reference to a set of Behavlets is shown below in Fig. 6. By providing a set of Behavlets in each of multiple mini-games, the Green My Place game facilitates the user with a broad range of actions and expected outcomes focusing on their behaviour change. Over time, the actions of the individual are able to influence the whole community through aggregation. 5.6. Mini-game example: Electrickery The following example serves to illustrate how the design of a specific mini-game interrelated with the Behavlet principles outlined above. The mini-game in question, Electrickery, was one of the first to be designed and implemented on account of its substantially simpler structure, and also represents the most broadly focussed design in the context of the Behavlets, since its central purpose is to bring awareness of the relative energy usage of different appliances. Within the context of Green My Place, the mini-games serve a crucial dual role. In addition to the implementation of the goals described above in the context of the Behavlet concept, each minigame serves as a compact ‘‘hook’’ (or point of entry) for the project.

Individuals discuss and share what entertains or amuses them, and as such the mini-games serve a viral role in advertising the project, adding value to the overall endeavour at multiple levels. Electrickery leveraged a convenient intersection between the established Behavlet content and pre-existing mass market sequential micro-games, typified by Nintendo’s exceptionally successful Brain Training games such as the 2005 Nintendo DS title Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day! (known as Dr. Kawashima’s Brain Training: How Old Is Your Brain? in PAL regions). The term ‘micro-game’ is attributable to Nintendo’s Research and Development 1 group, who coined it with reference to the content of their 2003 GameBoy Advance title WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgame$! (known as WarioWare, Inc: Minigame Mania in PAL regions). The idea behind a micro-game is to present the player with a minimal unit of gameplay lasting only a few seconds, in which they are expected to do one (and generally only one) action. Sequential micro-games, as per the aforementioned Brain Training games, are comprised of one micro-game format that reoccurs in rapid succession. The relevant micro-game format for Electrickery relies upon presenting the player with situations in which they are tasked to make a rapid judgement between comparable fields, within which they must either practically or intuitively reach a conclusion as to which is greater or lesser. Paradigmatic forms of this game style can be found in Nintendo’s 2005 Nintendo DS title Big Brain Academy (a more entertainment-centred parallel release to the aforementioned Brain Age title), particularly ‘‘Coin-parison’’, in which the player must evaluate two sets of coins of various denominations in order to determine which has the greater numerical value.

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Within Electrickery, the player is presented with different sets of electrical appliances and is challenged to determine which set of appliances represents the lowest wattage, thus which set of appliances uses the least energy. The game plays rapidly, engaging the

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player with its artificially framed pace to answer as rapidly as possible. While initially, players simply make near-random guesses as to what to select, after making a selection the wattage values of appliances are displayed allowing the player to gradually

Fig. 7. Electrickery screenshot: the bottom right half shows pre-choice screen (in Finnish), and the top left is the post-choice screen, showing that the wrong choice was made but illustrating which option was correct.

Fig. 8. A screen shot of Window Watcher. An uninterrupted sequence of correct choices will build a chain of bonus gems, shown on the left.

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assimilate this information (which is also provided in a reference guide). Fig. 7 shows these aspects of the game pre- and postchoice. Electrickery demonstrates how a mini-game can be constructed around essentially direct education of content, in this case, the wattage of appliances. It would be practically impossible to expect a mass market consumer to take an interest in learning this information, but the game format engages individuals by concealing the learning aspect of the play (always present, but not always evident) beneath a gloss of entertainment. 5.7. Mini-game example: Window Watcher Another example of a mini-game leveraging the Behavlet concept is Window Watcher, which takes the game form of a shooting gallery and re-contextualises it within the framework of the SAVE ENERGY project. Thus, the player is presented with stylised images of the exterior of the pilot buildings, and is tasked with spotting energy waste scenarios taking place within the rooms beyond the windows – see Fig. 8 below. The player becomes engaged with the play activity – which is scanning the activities of animated characters within the virtual building, looking for something that looks wasteful – and is largely unaware than in the process of playing the game they are inevitably learning about wasteful situations. Again, the mini-game functions to engage the interest of the individual in a way that prose description cannot attain, while detailed reading materials on the back end of the mini-game provide additional educational opportunities. Whereas with Electrickery, the focus was on the specific appliances uncovered by the Behavlet process, in the case of Window Watcher, the Behavlet directly informs the design of the mini-game. Each situation the player is being asked to respond to originates in the identified Behavlets. To the player, they are simply being asked to assess numerous situations and rapidly spot a certain situation (wasted energy). Unbeknownst to most players, they are becoming cognitively engaged in the process of spotting energy waste and learning the relevant Behavlets within a virtual context. The habits thus founded originally in play have the chance of being brought away from the virtual environment and into everyday life. 6. Conclusions The methods applied in the Green My Place game project demonstrate more effective ways to conduct serious game design when its objectives are related to behavioural change and social integration of new behaviour. Note that what is attempted here is not rhetoric or persuasion – the players of Green My Place are not being approached on the assumption that they do not wish to save energy, and must be convinced to do so. Conversely, they are already assumed to be interested in the environmentally positive goal of saving energy and are subtly and positively affected by both the mini-games and the meta-game framework to learn about the relevant domain and to apply what they learn in their real lives. The methodology at work within the massively multiplayer serious game framework leverages the foundations of commercial digital game design, and the best practices of pedagogical psychology, in order to provide a rich and engaging online social environment, which presents educational and behavioural goals as if they were to be interpreted as ‘‘fun’’, that is, as entertaining. There is no dishonesty in this representation: the learning that occurs within the multiple levels of nested play environments is genuine. What is distinct about it rests in the uncoupling of the assumption of simulation as the sine qua non of serious games from the pragmatic goals of education and social change, and the substitution of para-

digms of entertainment in preference to the paradigm of verisimilitude. 6.1. Evaluation The choice of principles from the literature was tailored to the requirements of the project, and to a degree was a matter of judgement. It is not prescriptive of the pedagogical principles others should choose if they use this paper for inspiration. However for similar problem domains these principles and implementation methods may prove effective, since the game produced using them has thus far garnered some promising early signs of success. Prototype assessment generated praise by the project reviewers from the European Commission and won 1st place in a serious games competition. At the time of writing the game has been launched in beta for 2 weeks (although the schedule of release activities within each pilot varies according to local factors). Evaluation of users in this early stage allows few behavioural insights – however we can cite a sign-up rate of users, going from 14 per month in the pre-beta testing phase, to 104 per month since beta launch. Also evident is that since the beta launch, around half of new sign-ups are actively playing the mini-game which was on offer (Electrickery), with one quarter playing multiple times (4 played over ten times) and 15% winning Greener medals. After 1 weekend on release the second game, Window Watcher, has had five players, winning one medal after playing over seven times on average. These are first indications that the game is creating engagement with its target audience, thus it has passed what Falstein in [9] called ‘‘the first quarter test’’. To get more play from the players we also added a tutorial animation to the sign-up process, with a strong injunction to support the players’ team – thus to reinforce the structure of the game itself in creating engagement. 6.2. Future work Throughout, we have heavily referenced Gee’s book [1] as a source of principles. It is important to realise that Gee described his principles as a cohesive set (reflecting his view of the complete manner in which games can teach), and there are indeed some which our design does not cover as well as others. Notably, there are several meta-level principles, such as the ‘design principle’, ‘self-knowledge principle’ and the ‘meta-level thinking about semiotic domains principle’. User-creation is not particularly easy to incorporate in micro- or mini-games. It would be possible to include elements that facilitate more meta-play including design (after additional development), by expanding the mini-games with modding tools. The Energy Dash mini-game in particular is based on a full featured map engine, and since game-play is largely based on maps, players could experiment with different map formations (even to the point of including types of self-created energy). This would be an avenue for future work. If serious games are to fulfil their potential as new approaches to education, social influence and perhaps also rhetoric [22], it will be necessary to explore new methods such as the one described within this paper, which couple entertainment software development methods (including social media platforms) to educational best practices, backed by systems which uncover the social, cultural and technological elements to be addressed, as per the Behavlet construct. We see at work here a continuation of the ‘multimodal principle’ which is already of much value in games [1]. People differ in their learning, social and play styles. Some forms of learning are more fun (more entertaining) than others, and these represent a rich reserve of source materials which future serious games may draw against. Scientific analysis can aid serious games by providing input materials from which software with mutual goals of entertainment and education can be developed, and

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by framing these within a social media context the result are systems which may represent a maximally effective way of influencing behaviour towards mutually beneficial ends.

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