Fostering Agriculture Environmental Awareness

Agriculture is important to any society, but its activity often has negative impact in the environment. We propose a game, implemented in the on-line virtual world platform Open-Simulator, that gives the opportunity to players to experience the potential effects of agriculture in the environment. The game was built with the purpose of promoting the awareness of agriculture issues, such as, the impact of fertilization in sources of fresh water, the problems related to deforestation and impact on the weather, and the importance of producing food with good quality. To make players care about these issues we explored the people's factor and created direct impact on a population of villagers that the player must satisfy in order to succeed in the game. A small pilot study was performed that showed signs of good acceptance by the players.