Application Design and Engagement Strategy of a Game with a Purpose for Climate Change Awareness

Abstract

The Climate Challenge is an online application in the tradition of games with a purpose that combines practical steps to reduce carbon footprint with predictive tasks to estimate future climate-related conditions. As part of the Collective Awareness Platform, the application aims to increase environmental literacy and motivate users to adopt more sustainable lifestyles. It has been deployed in conjunction with the Media Watch on Climate Change, a publicly available knowledge aggregator and visual analytics system for exploring environmental content from multiple online sources. This paper presents the motivation and goals of the Climate Challenge from an interdisciplinary perspective, outlines the application design including the types of tasks built into the application, discusses incentive mechanisms, and analyses the pursued user engagement strategies.