Purposeful Play: Serious, pervasive, energy games bridge the energy efficiency gap

Unofficial AI-generated summary based on the public title and abstract. Not an official translation.

🔬研究者:Provides empirical evidence on game-based interventions for energy efficiency, useful for behavioral GX research.

🏢実務担当者:Offers a tested framework for utilities and municipalities to design community engagement programs that drive energy savings.

🏛政策担当者:Highlights the potential of game-based approaches as a cost-effective complement to traditional energy efficiency policies.

Global warming trends and climate change create a compelling context for evaluating existingbuilding stock in the USA. Currently, buildings use almost 40% of all energy produced and are responsible for 38% of all greenhouse gas emissions. Although research shows that energy efficiency is the cheapest method to provide Americans with electricity, studies identify barriers preventing owners and occupants from adopting energy efficiency measures despite their costsaving potential. This failure to adopt energy- and cost-saving behaviors is known as the energy efficiency gap. Research on the energy efficiency gap notes the failure of households and governmentagencies to take full advantage of cost-effective energy-conserving opportunities, and discusses the structural and behavioral barriers to closing the energy efficiency gap. The research shows that consistent results on energy-efficiency programs’ effectiveness are elusive, and suggests that the ultimate cause of difficulties in measuring and addressing the energy efficiency gap might be heterogeneity of needs in the target demographic. Specifically, different issues are relevant to different consumers and consumer groups, making one-size-size-fits-all efforts effective only to a limited audience and less effective to other audiences. This dissertation contends that games have the potential to address the heterogeneity in consumer agency comprising of varying interests, needs, preparedness and resources, by harnessing game characteristics such as designed flexibility, voluntary participation, community-building, competition, incentives, pleasure motive, and skill-building. In addition, games can provide necessary triggers to create engagement. Pervasive games in particular make ordinary life action part of game play. Chapter 3 addresses the methodology and data collection in order to study the hypotheses that “playing a public or targeted, interactive, pervasive game can lead to awareness and learning about energy-savings; can engender willingness to engage in energysaving behavior; willingness to make energy saving investments; and lead to energy-savings in homes and schools.” A short history of energy games is outlined in order to contextualize the design of pervasive energy games for this research. An opportunity to test the contention of games’ potential to address the heterogeneity of needsemerged in 2014 with the Georgetown University Energy Prize (GUEP), a nationwide competition open to American cities with populations between 5,000 and 250,000 people. At the initiative of this dissertation’s author, and in partnership with North Dakota State University and two local utilities (Cass County Electric Cooperative and Xcel Energy), the City of Fargo, ND, entered the GUEP competition in 2014. Under the leadership of this dissertation’s author, the project team organized under the name “efargo.” Of the fifty cities that successfully achieved GUEP semifinalist status, and the ten finalist cities, Fargo emerged the winner of the Georgetown University Energy Prize, successfully reducing municipal and residential energy use in the City. Serious pervasive energy games that include building- and behavior-based approaches wereresearched, planned, designed and implemented by this dissertation’s author and the efargo team. From 2015-2018, data was collected prior to, during and after the implementation of two pervasive energy games. The first game, the efargo game, was a pervasive energy game open to public participation; it was implemented once in Spring 2016 over an 8-week game period and a 1-week kick-off period. The efargo game was designed to allow gamers to act on energy saving behaviors in their homes through game play. The second game, the efargo Energy Challenge, was a targeted pervasive energy gameimplemented in elementary and middle schools. Four design iterations of the efargo Energy Challenge were implemented and tested from 2016-2018. All the iterations asked participating schools to complete various educational and energy-saving (fixing) activities over a 3-6 week period in their schools. The game design, game tools, reporting structures and timeline were refined in response to feedback from teachers and students every year. Ongoing data collection through surveys, game play and energy-use tracking in partnership with the utilities and the University of North Dakota, provided the information for assessing the games. The following hypotheses were tested:1. Playing a serious pervasive energy game leads to learning about energy-savings. 2. Playing a serious pervasive energy game may engender a willingness to engage in energy-saving behavior. 3. Playing a serious pervasive energy game engenders a willingness to make energy-saving investments. 4. Playing a serious pervasive energy game may lead to energy savings. All four hypotheses were supported by positive findings. The dissertation concludes with concepts for future games frameworks that may addresslimitations, and provide an opportunity to do further research on unaddressed concepts, successful, unsuccessful, and inconclusive results.

• openalex https://doi.org/10.1184/r1/32761302.v1first seen 2026-08-17 04:56:34