The Design of Eco-mania: A Serious Game to Influence Positive Recycling Habits

Research suggests that recycling has various benefits to society including reducing waste, preventing pollution, and conserving natural resources and energy. For the recycling efforts of a country to be successful, the citizens of the country have to correctly sort their garbage in the right garbage bins so that items that should be recycled do not end up in landfills. Landfill sites can be responsible for the contamination of soil and groundwater. Thus, to ensure that items that can be recycled do not end up in landfills, there is an urgent need to teach people how to sort their waste. Serious games, games designed for other purposes besides entertainment, have been used in the past to teach important concepts such as nutrition education and computer programming. In the current paper, we developed a serious game, Eco-mania, to teach about recycling, particularly, how to sort household garbage for recycling. We present the design and development of the game which is based on the results of a systematic literature review previously carried out by the authors.