This year’s Big Green Week at UWE was a great opportunity to showcase our work around changing people’s behaviour to water consumption via gamification. Pipe Panic, an arcade Android title, saw its first public outing with pre-release downloads and some free giveaways. There was a lot of interest in the game on the day, and initial feedback has been good.
We also unveiled the gamification project for the UWE student village. Pocket Planet is a game where players manage the prosperity of their planets by saving water from their household. Using real-time data from meters at the Wallscourt Village, the game converts the water saved in the player’s households into water available in the game. By using less water in the ‘real world’, the player has more water to play with in the virtual world, and this has to be used alongside food and energy resources to manage and sustain a human population on the planet. Players with the highest sustained populations will win awards and we hope to initiate competition between players and households.
The objective of the project is to encourage students to use less water by using gamification and peer competition as an incentive. The project operates over technology, social, sustainability and hardware disciplines.