Interventional study demonstrates increased psychological ownership and water conservation behaviors after gameplay, highlighting key targets for educational game design.
Many educational settings have leveraged gamification to facilitate learning, yet empirical examination of sustainability-focused gamification has extended beyond knowledge acquisition to examine awareness, pro-environmental intentions, and behavior change. For example, understanding how in-game sustainability actions can translate into real-world pro-environmental action. Additionally, identifying and validating the specific psychological mechanisms underlying the relationship between educational environmental games and pro-environmental behavior warrants further attention. To contribute to this effort, we examined whether psychological ownership over water use, self-efficacy, and the likelihood of engaging in water conservation behaviors increased relative to baseline reports following an environmental serious game intervention. The findings suggested that the game-based intervention was associated with increased psychological ownership, self-efficacy, and reported likelihood of engaging in water conservation behaviors. This work further validates psychological ownership and self-efficacy as useful constructs that merit targeting in the design of environmental educational games, particularly for water sustainability games.
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Machniak et al. (2026) studied this question.