Exploring the Potential of Digital Games for Climate Education: A Review of Policy-Focused Climate Action Games

Abstract. Communicating the complexities of climate change and the challenges of climate policy decision-making remains a persistent challenge in geoscience and climate education. This review offers a focused examination of policy-oriented digital games addressing climate action, encompassing both mitigation and adaptation, and considers their potential as educational tools for fostering systems thinking and enhancing understanding of climate governance. It concentrates on digital games that combine engaging gameplay with substantive representations of climate action and meaningful learning opportunities, typically situated between large entertainment titles and specialized academic simulations. The review examines how these games frame climate policy dilemmas, articulate causal relationships, and represent trade-offs across scientific, social, and political domains. In particular, the review analyses key game design choices – such as how conflict is framed, decisions are structured, feedback is delivered, and time is compressed – which shape players' understanding of climate action and its environmental, social, and political consequences. The review furthermore offers a critical evaluation of how these games represent and simplify complex systems – especially how they portray climate action, climate models, and political decision-making processes. In addition to the main review, a separate section illustratively underscores the importance of debriefing – such as reflective practices in informal online discussions and formal education – in shaping learning outcomes. Overall, the review suggests that, for pedagogical practice, climate action games are most effective when combined with debriefing to support critical engagement with trade-offs and underlying model assumptions. For educational game design, the review highlights the importance of transparent feedback systems, meaningful temporal dynamics, and explicit representation of political and ideological dimensions. For future research, the review calls above all for empirical studies on players’ learning processes and outcomes across different age groups, demographics, and levels of prior knowledge and literacy, including how structured reflection and debriefing shape these processes and outcomes.