Serious Games as a Tool for the Landscape Education of High School students

The paper highlights the landscape related aspects of the development of a so-called “serious game” about climate change and present feedback from high school student focus groups and expert interviews with teachers. Conclusions are drawn for the further development of landscape visualizations, e.g. that established technologies in the gaming industry such as the Unity3D engine provide affordable and easily usable tools for dynamic and interactive landscape visualization. The focus groups also show that a serious game can engage high school students with environmental and landscape topics on a high level of complexity and that the game has contributed to raising their awareness about the local impacts of climate change. However, it is too early to say whether such a game can lead to changes in behavior as well.