1. Introduction

Climate change is not just a scientific challenge, it is a social one. The success of climate action depends on how well communities can cooperate and act together toward shared goals. Yet fostering that kind of collaboration can be difficult.

In recent years, serious games and escape rooms have emerged as innovative tools for engaging people in complex social and environmental problems. Unlike traditional learning formats, these experiences invite participants to play with possible futures, explore consequences, negotiate trade-offs, and build shared understanding. They do not just teach facts, they nurture teamwork, empathy, and civic agency, key components of social and civic competence.

When applied to climate issues, these playful spaces can help people connect global crises with local realities, transforming abstract fears into shared challenges.

2. Why Games and Escape Rooms Fit Climate Engagement

Serious games and escape rooms are built on experiential learning and social interaction. They require participants to communicate, divide roles, make decisions, and problem-solve together under time pressure, all elements that mirror the cooperative and systemic nature of climate action.

Indeed, recent studies indicate that serious games and escape rooms are not merely entertaining novelties, they are structured social experiences in which participants practice the very skills needed for community-based climate action: collaboration, communication, and collective problem-solving. Ouariachi and Wim (2020) examined a variety of climate-themed escape rooms and found that immersive storytelling, limited time, and collective puzzle-solving foster both motivation and deeper understanding of climate processes. Similarly, González-Muñoz et al. (2022) developed an Educational Escape Room on Energy and Climate Change (EER) and demonstrated that collaborative gameplay increased engagement, comprehension of energy-transition issues, and willingness to discuss real-world solutions. More recently, Repetto et al. (2024) analyzed digital escape rooms for sustainability learning and concluded that online collaboration can extend access to diverse participants while maintaining the social and motivational benefits of in-person teamwork.

3. Mechanisms by Which Games Foster Climate Engagement

When designed thoughtfully, serious games and escape rooms can activate several mechanisms that bridge the gap between awareness and action, such as:

Collective negotiation.
Players must discuss trade-offs, allocate resources, and agree on strategies. This practice of cooperative decision-making strengthens civic dialogue and empathy.

Role-taking and perspective shift.
By assigning participants roles such as citizen, policymaker, or entrepreneur, games allow people to experience different constraints and motivations, promoting systems thinking, essential for addressing shared environmental problems.

Feedback awareness.
Games visualize the effects of decisions within minutes, compressing time to reveal long-term consequences. Participants see how inaction or miscoordination worsens outcomes, internalizing lessons that data alone rarely convey.

Emotional engagement.
Escape rooms heighten urgency and narrative immersion (i.e. “you have 60 minutes to save the city from a flood”), reinforcing a sense of agency.

4. Practical examples: 2 Games That Turn Climate Concern into Collective Action

1.     Unlock the Future: The Environmental Escape Game