A serious game for changing mindsets about loans for home retrofitting

Adding energy-saving products to your house can benefitthe economy, the environment and your living comfort. However, theseproducts are very costly, and many people cannot afford them using theirown savings. There exist several options for funding these projects, butpeople do not take advantage of such due to lack of information andthe common negative view on using external funding. Psychological ob-jections on taking loans include future time perspective, perception ofshort time rewards and connotation of loans itself. This paper presentsa serious game aimed at changing people’s mindset on taking loans toretrofit energy into their homes;Supreme Green Time Machineis a ty-coon game in which you can acquire energy-saving products for yourhome. A main mechanic in the game is the opportunity to take loans tofund the purchase of these upgrades. Combined with other underlyingmechanics, such as the time progress and social feedback, the game tar-gets the different psychological objections to long term loans for homeretrofitting. From a preliminary evaluation, we conclude that SupremeGreen Time Machine effectively succeeds in making players more positivetowards using loans to retrofit their homes.

@InProceedings { DPRROBSB20,
  author       = "Dikken, Olivier and Prakash, Kushal and Roseboom, Bart and Rubio, Ana and Ostvik, Sander and Bueno, Mijael and
                  Salamon, Nestor Z. and Bidarra, Rafael",
  title        = "A serious game for changing mindsets about loans for home retrofitting",
  booktitle    = "Games and Learning Alliance",
  series       = "LNCS",
  volume       = "12517",
  pages        = "347--361",
  month        = "dec",
  year         = "2020",
  editor       = "Iza Marfisi-Schottman, Francesco Bellotti, Ludovic Hamon, Roland Klemke",
  publisher    = "Springer International Publishing",
  note         = "9th International Conference GALA 2020",
  url          = "http://graphics.tudelft.nl/Publications-new/2020/DPRROBSB20"
}