Game-Based Approaches to Enhancing Public Understanding of Science: A Descriptive Literature Review

Abstract

With prominent looming global issues such as climate change and COVID-19, public understanding of science (PUS) is increasingly perceived to be vital for humanity to address and adapt to global wicked challenges. Compared to conventional approaches that struggle with public engagement, games can potentially remedy this by proactively engaging players towards more fruitful performance in and outside games. While the employment of game-based approaches in pedagogy in general is not a new development, gamifying PUS has only recently grown to relative prominence for its superiority in engaging the public with active science-derived interpretation, deliberation, and consequent action. To understand the state-of-the-art of this field, we conduct a systematic descriptive literature review of the extant corpus. We reviewed 29 papers and investigated their types of interventions, contexts, populations, and outcomes. The results overall indicate diverse yet imbalanced research focuses thus far, for which we discuss implications for future research.