At the end of the compulsory course of "Sustainable Design Concept" in the School of Design and Creativity of Tongji University, students shared the results of the "Carbon Story" gamification works on the spot
Some time ago, we reported that a professor in the history department of the University of Arizona made game content for one of the battles of Age of Empires 4, and his students can experience this special battle in the game from 2022 and receive an credit after passing the assessment.
In fact, not only abroad, but also some domestic colleges and universities are also actively trying to make games into the classroom and become a learning tool.
These days, we experienced a lowpoly style card collection game, the game has three levels, namely chocolate factory, supermarket magic night, picnic time, players need to catch enough food in each level to earn points, and in the process of catching food, the corresponding food cards will be collected.
Interestingly, each food card has a "special task" of showing the carbon footprint of the food produced during production and transportation. The more the player catches these escaped foods, the higher the "carbon credit", which is the carbon dioxide emission quota set by the European Union, and the enterprise or individual cancels the carbon footprint by purchasing carbon credits.
Through this game, players can understand the carbon emissions behind each food, not just from the food itself. For example, due to the need for cold chain transportation, 1 avocado has the same carbon emissions as 1KG banana; Although the production of 1KG of bread produces only 1.5KgCO2, bread is the most easily wasted food, with a waste rate of 17%, so the carbon emissions generated are huge
The Food of Escape card
Different foods and their carbon footprint
From the perspective of the design of the game, the dissemination of carbon emission related knowledge is obviously the core of "Running Away Food", and the place where this science-based functional game designed with the theme of carbon neutrality was born was in the classroom of Tongji University.
Not only "Running Away Food", tongji University's School of Design and Creativity has also given birth to "Clockwork Goose", "Carbontopia", "Garbage Islands Republic", "Carbon Capture Battle" and several related works based on games as the carrier, popular science carbon neutrality and environmental protection concepts.
Presenting learning outcomes in a playful way is the first time for a 10-year-old Sustainable Design compulsory course. In the words of Tong Yuzhou, a representative of the "Sustainable Design Concept" course mentor team at the School of Design and Creativity of Tongji University, "In the past, the final report usually used traditional text and flat forms, but the curriculum is keeping pace with the times, and we are constantly trying to combine new technical means. ”
The combination of teaching and games is another good embodiment of the value of games, and at the same time, the use of games to tell the relevant knowledge of carbon neutrality can also play a better effect for popular science.
How does the game tell the "carbon story"?
According to a 2021 report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), global warming cannot be stopped for the next 30 years, with human greenhouse gas emissions being the most important cause. In order to cope with this situation, China has proposed the "3060" target in 2020, reaching a peak by 2030 and achieving carbon neutrality by 2060. In order to achieve this goal, the layout at the national level is the only way to go, and the necessity of popularizing carbon neutrality to the public is also an important factor in promoting carbon neutrality.
The school of design and creativity of Tongji University chose the method of interpreting the concept of "carbon neutrality" by gamification from the professional perspective of design. Tong Yuzhou said: "How to make the design beneficial to the ecological environment, tell the story of carbon that the people can understand from the level of daily life, and serve to promote and implement the national double carbon strategy is the reason and goal of the curriculum design." ”
In order to better promote this cooperation, based on the academic research and insight of global functional games, Tencent Interactive Entertainment Social Value Research Center shared the research results such as "Selected Environmental Protection Games in the Past Decade" to the students, and held a series of lectures and workshops to help students explore more possibilities for combining sustainable design and gamification methods.
Students participate in paper play workshops
How to allow students who do not have a foundation in game design to fully study "carbon neutrality" in a semester, find their own entry angles, and present them in a gamified way? According to the students, in addition to inquiring about information through various public channels, they also accepted the technical support provided by Tencent.
Students from the Carbon Capture Project group said about the game value theory: "The learning of programming and game editors is mainly through YouTube and bilibili related videos, querying roblox API documents and developer forums, and communicating with Robles technical teachers every Tuesday to solve difficulties. ”
It is also under the joint efforts of Tencent Interactive Entertainment Social Value Research Center, Robles and teachers and students from Tongji University's School of Design and Creativity that in just 3 months, carbon-neutral science games with diverse styles and categories were born.
Behind the sense of immersion and interaction, the space of game value
Compared with other carriers such as text, pictures, film and television, the game's high immersion experience mode and the two-way interaction characteristics that are different from other entertainment industries make the media attributes of the game infinitely enlarged, thus becoming an excellent carrier for cross-border bearing.
Clockwork Goose is an RPG box game that focuses on the impact of warming on the ecology of the polar regions, and players will interact with the penguin perspective to find the high-emission items of carbon dioxide in the game and destroy NPCs. The student team said: "In the selection of the course, compared with the game, the text and picture are the 'brain skin' that transmits knowledge to the person and tells the audience a wonderful story, but the game can feel deep into the player's memory and heart through 'personal experience'. ”
Game graphics
In addition to the more recognition of the form of output, this cooperation between the two sides is also an innovation in the teaching method. American educator John Dewey once published a very famous "do learning" theory, Dewey believes that doing middle school can make learning more interesting. Obviously, in the virtual environment, it can be approximated to the real "learning by doing", thereby improving students' problem-solving ability, creativity and other high-level abilities. At the same time, compared with flat expressions such as words, the final report presented by students using games as a carrier will give them a sense of accomplishment.
Different from the case of the University of Arizona introduced at the beginning of this article, the cooperation between Tongji University and Tencent is to let students make games by themselves, in the process of making games, in addition to learning the relevant courses of game design, it is also necessary to understand enough about carbon neutrality related knowledge, so that the game can be used as a carrier to export relevant content.
Compared with the traditional text and flat form, such a way obviously requires higher reserves of knowledge content.
Carbontopia is a role-playing adventure game set in the late 2120s, where players manipulate the protagonist Xiao Qiao to gain knowledge about carbon footprint and sustainability concepts by constantly replenishing the carbon footprint and exploring levels. The Carbontopia team said: "In addition to the gameplay concept, we must also have enough theoretical support to complete our concept of 'overload day', so we consulted a lot of information to further understand the contribution of various types of gases to atmospheric pollution." ”
The protagonist of the game "Xiao Qiao"
Students from the "Carbon Capture Battle" project team agreed. Carbon Capture Is a shooter-based running chart game focused on carbon capture technology, the so-called "carbon capture", that is, capturing carbon dioxide for compression and sending it back to a depleted oil field, natural gas field or other safe underground place. The game is based on the logical convergence point between carbon capture technology and shooter games, abstracting the technology into a carbon capture gun and purification machine in the game. "The first thing is that I think it will be fun to make games, and I have always been interested in trying. In addition, we believe that games are more ways to experience sustainability than the simple words and pictures of sustainable issues in the past. The students said.
Carbon Capture Battle game screen
The cooperation between Tongji University and Tencent, in our opinion, whether it is trying to popularize carbon neutral knowledge in the form of games, or using games as the main tool for teaching, it is the embodiment of the value of games, and it also shows that the space for game value is very broad.
"From China to West Asia to Rome, from chessboard dice to lilly royal books, games are an integral part of culture in different civilizations, and good games can inspire and drive vitality and help people socialize; Can cultivate the ability to exercise thinking, strengthen the body and puzzle; It can reflect the characteristics of different cultures, express the worldview and values of the designers and convey them to gamers, influence even generations, and have great social value. Tong Yuzhou said.
Those games that have been proven to crossover
The social value of games is indeed already being applied in many areas.
In the medical field, Tencent Games and Chen Tianqiao Luo Qianqian Brain Science Research Institute (TCCI) developed the brain cognitive game "Pavlov is Busy", which stimulates the player's brain development by gamified means, improves the brain cognitive ability of different dimensions such as attention, thinking speed, memory, inductive reasoning and spatial imagination, and may even assist in the treatment of some specific diseases.
In the field of culture, "Wild Goose Hills" uses digital means to inherit traditional brush painting skills, through the decryption of secret rooms and interesting interactive mini-games, so that players can understand the history of cultural relics, archaeology and other historical and cultural knowledge in the process of the game, as well as excellent intangible cultural knowledge such as pot throwing, Ru kiln, traditional shadow puppetry, etc., to attract young people to deeply understand traditional culture.
"Goose Hills"
In the field of public welfare, Tencent Games and Language Publishing House jointly launched "Mandarin Town", based on the diversified scenes in life, work and study, based on "1000 Sentences of Putonghua" as the content model, through the core gameplay cultivated by the town, edutainment and education, to help Mandarin learning.
In the field of education, the natural science education product "Little Goose Planet" for teenagers focuses on interactive gamification teaching, showing children the continuous evolution of life on earth from the Big Bang to the birth of human civilization, stimulating the interest and motivation of young people in learning, and helping them learn natural science knowledge about "species evolution".
Planet Goose
In addition, game technology is also generating more wide application value.
As a platform that integrates cutting-edge technologies such as physics simulation, 3D modeling, and real-time rendering, the game engine's powerful capabilities have attracted great attention from all walks of life. Especially in the field of industrial manufacturing, such as civil aviation, automobile manufacturing and other fields, game engines and traditional industrial software are connected and complementary, playing the role of "new industrial software".
Yu Jiang, professor and doctoral supervisor of the Institute of Strategic Development of Science and Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said: "The new generation of digital content technology represented by game technology has the outstanding characteristics of high intelligence, high interaction and high realism. Games are highly integrated and interdisciplinary disciplines, while constantly generating new technological problems, it is an area full of innovative vitality. Pay more attention to how digital content technology can better promote the development of related underlying technologies, basic technologies, and core technologies, so as to form a positive interaction with our industrial business models and innovations, including these chip innovation ecology, technology software innovation ecology, underlying algorithm innovation ecology, etc. with interdisciplinary, multi-technology integration, and multi-ecological embedding. ”
Win-win cooperation helps to broaden the boundaries of game value
The space for game value is vast.
In the game's cross-border cooperation again and again, it relies on the unique carrier characteristics of the game and the huge young user group behind it.
How to better play the positive value of games is the direction that many game practitioners are exploring. We can see that over the past few years, many games have tried to connect traditional cultures, and some serious functional games with different directions have also come out.
These have achieved good results, but the positive value of the game is a continuous dynamic derivation of the subject, as Tong Yuzhou said, the development of science and technology to the information age, production efficiency by leaps and bounds, great material abundance at the same time, but also produced a lot of social problems: climate environment, mental health, social instability caused by the disparity between rich and poor and so on. How to develop games that have the characteristics of the times and can play a positive value is a challenge for game designers.
How to deal with this challenge is the answer that the entire industry needs to give, and one of the directions is to increase cooperation with professional institutions and give full play to their respective strengths. Take the branch functional game in the value of the game as an example, it is extremely dependent on the relevant field to give professional support. The development of many functional games requires the involvement of government agencies, scientific research institutions and universities.
For example, in the process of developing the functional game "Pavlov is Busy", one of the difficulties of Tencent Games is how to quantify cognitive ability and how to set the difficulty of each level according to the derived values. To this end, the R&D team fully communicated and debugged with Yang Zhi, chief researcher of TCCI, professor of Shanghai Mental Health Center, professor of Shanghai Jiao Tong University Institute of Psychological and Behavioral Sciences, and his team in the planning process to ensure the professionalism and rigor of game design.
"Pavlov is Busy"
The release of the value of the game requires the support of professional institutions, and professional institutions can also open their minds in the process of combining with the game. Such cooperation is achieving a win-win situation in the fields of education, science popularization, and environmental protection, and the boundaries of games are constantly expanding.
Speaking of this cooperation with the School of Design and Creativity of Tongji University, for universities, cooperation with enterprises can also help them open up bigger ideas. Tong Yuzhou concluded: "In today's information age, there are many channels for students to obtain knowledge. How to provide students with a good learning experience, how to prevent behind closed doors, avoid the disconnect between theory and practice and the aging of knowledge and skills, the transfer of professional depth knowledge and the sharing of practical experience, the practical counseling and practical requirements of enterprise mentors, can help schools cultivate design talents that are closely integrated with society. ”
*Zhu Xiaocun, Yao Xueyan, Liu Yang, etc. of the "Sustainable Design Concept" course of the School of Design and Creativity of Tongji University also contributed to this article.