The Great and the Green: Sustainable Development in Serious Games.

Sustainable development education remains a hugely relevant and urgent pursuit across all sectors of society. In 2002, the United Nations General Assembly declared 2005-2014 the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development. Within the European Union, there has been a focus on establishing regulations with regard to environmental awareness and prevention solutions in European countries over the past 30 years. The U.S. Partnership for Education for Sustainable Development (USPESD) was conceived in 2003 and is dedicated to education for sustainable development in the United States. This paper puts forth the case for the use of serious games to help support this noble cause through the use of games for conventional skills and knowledge development related to sustainable development, in addition to the use of games to help promote a shift in fundamental attitudinal dimensions by constituting a form of procedural rhetoric (Bogost, 2007) based around the learner experiences of rule-governed variables related to sustainability education. This paper offers a qualitative meta-analysis of the learning computer and video games have been shown to support and goes on to focus in on the specific area of games which are aimed at fostering knowledge and skills related to sustainable development, in addition to cultivating a range of important generic metacognitive and 21st century skills. The authors map a range of such skills and learning to a spectrum of existing commercial and serious video game titles, across a wide range of game genres, including strategy games, simulation games, action games, amongst others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]