Greenies getting with tech programme
Images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons - Simon Waldherr
Festivals around the world promoting Games for Change serve as reminders that Gaming and XR (extended reality - augmented and virtual reality) aren’t just about fun and escapism. This burgeoning multi- media mega industry might be one of the more useful tools for instilling a consciousness to reduce single plastic use - bringing home environmental change that is eluding environmentalists.
It’s called getting with the programme.
https://research.bond.edu.au/en/activities/2024-games-for-change-festival-event This Festival is happening in June 2024.
What we as greenies have to love about the gaming world is the direct connection with the audience and the visual grab factor. Games allow us to travel in space and time in a fully immersive experience. The appeal of the gaming world including XR/virtual and augmented reality comes from being visually and less verbally pedantic. Gaming is impulse driven, concerns action, the element of surprise, and is about striving to win, rather than thinking and moralising. Here is a great article on different types of environmental games circulating in the cyber-sphere and their benefits. Above all, games are appealing and fun because they involve competition, and suspense. All these elements combined help to stir up the emotive, recall and sub-conscious drivers potentially leading to behavioural change.
The benefits of gaming and technology aren’t going to go away any time soon, because the younger generations are tuned in for good.
Campaigners and educators owe the world a duty to tune in to the widest possible audience to sell our messages.
And this is also news to us from above link from Bond Uni Australia -
“Since 2004 the Games for Change Festival has served as the leading outlet, leveraging the immersive power of games to inspire a global community in addressing critical social issues, fostering collaboration, and empowering individuals to drive positive societal change.”
Classroom Games- Non Screen Games
On Converse Conserve website educators and parents can search for examples of games that can be played in the School, holiday programme or other learning context. Note: these are mostly off-screen class-room, or more physical, outdoorsy games.
Classroom Games and Activities found on our Converse Conserve site are more imagination-based, incorporating craft, making things, visual or arty creativity, story-telling, sing-songs, being a wordsmith, featuring dress-ups, some theatrics or dramatics, as well as potentially a sense of competition and suspense.
Educational games sites focus on formal lesson plans incorporating games for older students - surrounding key climate change themes - carbon cycle, lakes, trees etc. These learning programmes are clearly more thinking, strategy and rationalisation focused, to enable a correlation between learning and the set curriculum. Cool Australia is an example of a more educational - curriculum based website, but concerned less with games and more with learning in a more linear way. And more links are available under Education Aids.