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AgriVillage: A Game to Foster Awareness of the Environmental Impact of Agriculture

Published: 13 February 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Agriculture, while of uttermost importance for society, may also have a strong negative impact on the environment. Hence we propose a game that offers players the opportunity to experience the effects of different styles of agriculture on the environment. The game was built with the purpose of promoting the awareness of agriculture issues, such as, (1) the impact of fertilizers in sources of fresh water, (2) the problems related to deforestation and impact on the weather, and (3) the importance of balancing environmental and economic perspectives in order to produce food of good quality with low impact on the environment—and at the same time keep the activity sustainable. To make players care about these issues, we added a direct impact of the players' actions on a population of non-player characters, the villagers, whose simple autonomous behaviors resemble that of living entities. The game was implemented in the multi-user online three-dimensional (3-D) virtual world platform Open-Simulator, which supports an immersive user experience and high accessibility. An experiment was performed and showed that the game improved players' knowledge about agriculture and their awareness of the environmental impact of agriculture.

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Cited By

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  • (2024)Enhancing Visitor Experiences and Economic Outcomes Through Gamified AR: The Impact of a Location-Based Augmented Reality Game in AgritourismJournal of Open Innovation: Technology, Market, and Complexity10.1016/j.joitmc.2024.100415(100415)Online publication date: Nov-2024
  • (2021)Exploring the Use of Virtual Reality to Support Environmentally Sustainable Behavior: A Framework to Design ExperiencesSustainability10.3390/su1302094313:2(943)Online publication date: 18-Jan-2021
  • (2017)A Scalable Multiagent Architecture for Monitoring Biodiversity ScenariosMulti-Agent-Based Simulations Applied to Biological and Environmental Systems10.4018/978-1-5225-1756-6.ch004(81-105)Online publication date: 2017

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Published In

cover image Computers in Entertainment
Computers in Entertainment   Volume 12, Issue 2
Theoretical and Practical Computer Applications in Entertainment
Summer 2014
84 pages
EISSN:1544-3574
DOI:10.1145/2701657
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 13 February 2015
Published in CIE Volume 12, Issue 2

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Author Tags

  1. 3-D multi-user online virtual worlds
  2. Serious games
  3. agriculture
  4. environmental issues

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Enhancing Visitor Experiences and Economic Outcomes Through Gamified AR: The Impact of a Location-Based Augmented Reality Game in AgritourismJournal of Open Innovation: Technology, Market, and Complexity10.1016/j.joitmc.2024.100415(100415)Online publication date: Nov-2024
  • (2021)Exploring the Use of Virtual Reality to Support Environmentally Sustainable Behavior: A Framework to Design ExperiencesSustainability10.3390/su1302094313:2(943)Online publication date: 18-Jan-2021
  • (2017)A Scalable Multiagent Architecture for Monitoring Biodiversity ScenariosMulti-Agent-Based Simulations Applied to Biological and Environmental Systems10.4018/978-1-5225-1756-6.ch004(81-105)Online publication date: 2017

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