Videogames have become educational, communicative and social tools among the young, favouring the acquisition of skills, abilities and values, encompassing an endless number of themes, and helping them to experience and to face, in the first person, a great diversity of environmental situations and ecology problems. Thus, the present article aims: (a) to evaluate a sample of 20 educational videogames about water, making use of some empirical criteria of quality; and (b) to design, validate and apply an integrated quality indicator of educational videogames on water, based on the aspects of narrative, gameplay and education, which allows us to obtain a ranking. The findings reflect a ranking of games allowing us to suggest that the nature of the game (simulation, adventures, platforms or questions) does not determine the quality of the game, although generally simulations and adventure games are placed in a range of medium- or high-quality, as well as those games that pursue objectives related to the design and management of a territory in a sustainable way. The paper provides teachers with quality criteria based on narrative and gameplay that complement and enrich the pedagogical dimension.
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Video games have the potential to educate and engage people—especially young people—in climate change and energy issues by facilitating the development of helpful thoughts, feelings, and actions. The objective of the present article is to propose a set of game attributes that could maximise the cognitive, emotional, and behavioural engagement of players, and lay the foundations for future work. We have used semi-structured interviews with experts to identify a set of game attributes and a group discussion with teenagers to validate them. By applying grounded theory in our analysis of the experts’ responses, we have developed a framework for climate change engagement through serious games. It consists of 15 key attributes that we have classified in three dimensions: cognitive, emotional, and behavioural. Literature review drawn on sources in social psychology, communication and education has contributed to further explain and justify the inclusion of each of the attributes.
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