After our successful meeting in Turin on accessibility and inclusion, the UpGameIn team met again, this time in Poland, to tackle the next big challenge: the environment. Hosted by our partners, Fundacja Fantazmat, our three-day Learning, Teaching, and Training Activity (LTTA) was a deep dive into the world of “green” gaming.
The Mission: Building the Second Chapter
Our goal was to transform the abstract idea of “sustainability in gaming” into concrete, practical content for the second section of our Resource Library. How can games make us more environmentally conscious? And how can the game creation process itself become more planet-friendly?
Key Moments and Activities
The workshop was a combination of presentations, interactive games, and creative collaboration.
- Knowledge Exchange: Each partner presented their research. We, as Odd Statue Social, presented the potential of gamification for environmental education, analyzing how game mechanics can reward sustainable behavior.
- Experiential Learning: Our hosts organized an impressive live-action role-playing game (LARP), where we experienced firsthand how experience-based pedagogy can teach complex social and environmental dynamics.
- Synthesizing Ideas and Planning Next Steps: Drawing inspiration from the presentations and experiential learning, we dedicated valuable time to fruitful discussions. We exchanged ideas on how our extensive research could be transformed into a clear, practical, and user-friendly guide. These discussions were crucial for setting priorities and defining the next steps for the final writing and finalization of the second section of the Resource Library.
Key Takeaways
We left Poland with a clear direction and three key findings:
- Teaching Sustainability Requires Systems Thinking: The best educational games about the environment are not those that simply inform, but those that make players understand the connections and consequences of their actions.
- Cultural Diversity is an Asset: The different perspectives of the partners from Greece, Italy, and Poland enriched the discussion on sustainability, leading to a more holistic approach.
- The Strategy is Ready for Implementation: We now have a shared understanding and all the material we need to begin creating a guide that we hope will become a benchmark.
The meeting in Poland was a critical step. Now, we are back to work to turn these ideas into the guide that will be released in the coming months. Stay tuned!
