Overview
This article examines how consumers make decisions about whether to repair or replace home appliances in Ireland. It focuses on the EVIDENT serious game, an interactive tool designed to explore energy decision-making, repair behaviour and behavioural biases linked to premature appliance replacement.
Methods
The study used six interactive workshops with 44 participants in Ireland. The workshops included gameplay, post-game surveys, focus group discussions and feedback on the usability and acceptability of the serious game.
The EVIDENT serious game is a virtual life simulation game within which players must manage a virtual home, while maintaining their characters' basic needs (such as hunger, warmth, and hygiene), finances and energy consumption. Players of the game can move around their virtual home, completing daily activities (i.e., mealtimes, washing, entertainment etc.) while making energy decisions. Players receive immediate feedback on the financial, wellbeing and energy impacts of each decision they make within the game through visual gauges on the top left of their screens (see Fig. 1). Within the game the user will be advised that an appliance has broken and must determine if it should be repaired or replaced. Depending on the players' initial decision, a negotiation with a repairperson will ensue, to establish willingness to pay for repair. Feedback on the decision will then be provided. The player will then return to maintaining their home and make further repair/replace decisions using this information.
Main Findings
The study found that serious games can be a useful way to explore repair and replacement decisions, but they must be easy to use, engaging and grounded in real-life contexts.
To conclude, while serious games appear a promising means to explore complex energy decision making, such as repair/replace, user input into design is of pivotal importance to ensure usability, acceptability, and external validity. While pilot workshops appear an effective means to gather user input, results highlight the importance of both qualitative and quantitative approaches within these workshops to ensure sufficiently rich and detailed insight is gathered
