Ecological videogames as a means to raise environmental awareness

Resumen

This paper presents a series of ecological video games with clearly defined aesthetic designs as paradigms in the field of education for the care of natural resources and the environment. From a global perspective, the children of the 21st century will inherit the Earth of tomorrow. Some of the most drastic changes and challenges in the world today include environmental protection and climate change. In the case of the Canary Islands, the landscape, flora and fauna are key components of its identity and culture. Video games can be used as educational tools to design teaching proposals aimed at protecting the natural environment and engaging younger generations to get involved in looking after these natural spaces. As he explains the tools of the past to give way to platforms relating to the field of media that must be valued to experiment with new forms of expression applied to the artistic field: «It is now time to digitalize historical analogies, the transitions between a historical or artistic forms, to finally accomplish the aesthetic revolution operated by the Virtual. The Virtual concretely becomes Neo-ludic, as in a coherent field of new forms of expression, wittingly including all those who are identified as their predecesor.» From this idea, the notion of "artistic video game" and educational entails notions of aesthetics, of learning through play, of interactivity, of transmedia narrative formats, of postmodern concepts such as simulacrum, simulation, as well as those who use video games for artistic purposes to achieve a goal such as Joan Leandre, other authors use video game support to adopt a visual author's language such as Jon Haddock´s Screenshots which uses scenes from newspapers or images from films transferred to the video game. This research paper provides an explanation of why ecological education based on these notions of art and aesthetics that are linked is essential in the university context, specific examples of ecological videogames that will be used as educational teaching resources, a description of educational video games or serious games as a platform for teaching and learning, a teaching proposal related to ecological video games, and, lastly, the conclusions obtained.