Make it fun, make it count: how serious games help cut food waste

Pieces of food disappearing into a bin with every wrong answer and neighbours crafting recipes together with vegetables from their "edible district". Where dry statistics fail, fun and emotions prove powerful tools for raising awareness about food waste and food sharing. Challenges remain, but experts agree: "Serious games have enormous potential to mobilise and engage communities in environmental education".

The experience was designed to be provocative, and it worked.

"There were people screaming at each other, people were insulting each other. I was surprised at how strong a reaction we saw," says Markus Löchtefeld, Professor in Sustainable Interaction Design at Aalborg University in Denmark. His students were the guinea pigs in "Face-the-Waste", a game modelled on "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?", in which they had to answer questions related to food waste. With each wrong answer, an actual piece of food would disappear down a conveyor belt and fall into a bin.

"It provoked insane reactions, they got really angry at each other when stuff fell into the garbage bin. If somebody said like 'oh the answer's A' and the other said 'no no no it's B', it got heated. There were insults, there were people saying like 'oh God no, we lost another Twix' or whatever it was that dropped into the bin. It was really interesting to see what happened there."

Food waste is responsible for 6% of global greenhouse gas emissions, but for Löchtefeld, the reaction of his students to the 2021 experiment was proof that such games have more effect than dry statistics.

"It made me realise that moralising – patronising people and trying to teach them facts about things—is maybe the wrong approach to all of this. I think we've seen this now so much with everything related to climate change: like 'you should or shouldn't do it this way'. We have to talk about what we do with leftover food from kids etc, but I always feel it's wrong to force it down people's throats. It's better to actually give them some form of skills that will lead to better results."

A study published in March 2023 by researchers at University of Nottingham Malaysia noted the increasing use of serious games for environmental education. Of 56 research papers they reviewed, 35 dated from the previous five years. Successful games, their report said, featured "immersive experience, meaningful engagement, a learn-by-doing involvement, simulation of real-world environmental problems, choices in game decisions and the presence of a host".

"Environmental issues are highly complex: they involve societal issues, they involve psychological issues, and so one can emulate these in the games by injecting certain tasks that people will have to solve together," argues co-author Dr. Cedric Tan, who has recently helped develop a board game to promote human coexistence with elephants. "So it builds on transferable skills such as communication and leadership, and all these are very much needed when tackling environmental issues in a collaborative format."

"You need to serve a serious purpose which is beyond entertainment, so you need to have a clear message learning outcome that you want to achieve," adds co-author Nurul Asna Hidayah, who specialises in engaging rural communities with conservation work. "People love to strategise and re-strategise, so a good game is a game where you allow a multiple path to winning. Games are always competitive. I believe that the thing that you always remember apart from the lesson of the game is the emotion tied to it between the players."

At Rijnvliet, a suburb of Utrecht in the Netherlands, Derkiene van der Ziel was among a group of residents invited to test out "Let's Eat!", a board game which builds on the district's "edible forest" as part of the EU's Cultivate project to support food sharing and make urban food systems more sustainable. The aim is to produce a collective recipe book using food partially made from local ingredients.

"We had a fun, upbeat evening and got to know each other a bit better and also our neighbourhood. It was also inspiring to think about the ingredients for our recipes and their replacement with greens from the neighbourhood," she says. "It generated even more enthusiasm for the edible neighbourhood and social cohesion with residents."

"There's something it seems almost timeless now, about sitting around a table and playing a card game or playing a board game. We're co-creating games with communities: these are games you can play with rules but you can also adapt them to the needs of your group," says Jessica Duncan, Associate Professor in the Politics of Food Systems Transformations at Wageningen University, and co-developer of several games within the Cultivate project.

She acknowledges that serious games present a difficult balance between education and entertainment: "What we find is that a lot of these games are either not serious or fun, or they're only serious or they're only fun. It's really hard to find a game that is both deeply scientific and deeply fun, and getting that right means for us really working together with designers and scientists and communities."

The Rijnvliet Edible Neighbourhood in Utrecht

Many commercial games "are aimed at entertaining rather than for learning," agrees Cedric Tan. "Also there are lots of games out there that are targeting the younger generation, so we know little about the effects among adults." The University of Nottingham Malaysia report identifies several "gaps and challenges" in understanding of the impacts of serious games, for example, the lack of data.

It's one thing to enjoy playing serious games and absorb the educational message: it's quite another to put lessons into practice over time. Markus Löchtefeld says one student recently told him that they still played "FridgeSort", another game designed to reduce food waste, several years after helping to test it. But although Derkiene van der Ziel says she could host "Let's Eat!" and invite neighbours—"a fun winter event!"—she doubts that people will continue to play it as it is "quite complex" and "requires quite a bit of preparation".

Jessica Duncan recognises that with life "an uphill struggle" for many people, the convenience of opting for products that can be "packaged and grabbed at the supermarket" is understandable. "But we are also trying to rethink our relationships to food, and I think that's really fundamental," she adds. "Within some of these games we are teaching—food skills, exploring new recipes that maybe can be integrated in new ways into people's diets—there is research that when you engage communities, and when you ensure that people feel their voices are heard, that mobilises them to also engage more directly in political processes."

The University of Nottingham Malaysia study concludes that technological advances mean there is huge potential for newly developed digital games to "help bring the natural environment into the learning classroom or bring the learners to interact with nature… This might be the way forward for the beneficial use of serious games in environmental education."

Markus Löchtefeld agrees: "The rise of mobile games has been insane over the last 10 years, this is something that is unprecedented, so many people playing games," he says. "This is not the silver bullet that will cure everything, that's for sure, but every little bit helps. Many small steps are as good as one large step, and if these small steps are fun, it's even better."

Article by Alasdair Sandford

Photo Credit: Txell Blanco, Leonardo Improta

Contributors

Markus Löchtefeld

Dr. Cedric Tan

Nurul Asna Hidayah

Derkiene van der Ziel

Jessica Duncan

Txell Blanco

Contacts:

Project coordinator:

Anna Davies
daviesa@tcd.ie

Trinity College Dublin

Communication Manager:
Leonardo Improta
leonardo.improta@icons.it

Fondazione ICONS

Project website: https://cultivate-project.eu/
LinkedIn: CULTIVATE
Instagram: cultivate_eu
Facebook: Cultivate project
YouTube: Cultivate

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