| 10 Apr 2026
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.
Dear André Czauderna,
Thank you for submitting your work the Special Issue "Climate and ocean education and communication: practice, ethics, and urgency". First, I want to highlight that your manuscript addresses a relevant topic and offers a well-structured comparative overview of policy-oriented climate action games. However, I also think that your paper would benefit from clearer methodological positioning, a narrower focus, and greater analytical depth to really do justice to your comparative analysis of different policy-focused climate action games.
My first comment is that in presenting your analysis as a review, I first through that I was about to read a literature review. While your primary objects of analysis are games rather than research studies, I think that the manuscript would benefit from a clearer positioning as a comparative analysis of selected artefacts rather than a review.
The ambition of the manuscript is clear, and the breadth of topics you cover (game design, learning, representations of climate science, political processes, and ideological framing) allows you to map out important patterns across the selected games. However, this breadth also limits the depth of the analysis. Several of the most significant issues you raise (e.g., simplification of complex systems, representations of political processes, pedagogical implications of design choices) are treated primarily at a descriptive level. As a result, the paper tends to identify recurring patterns without fully interrogating their implications. Narrowing the analytical focus and engaging more deeply with a smaller set of dimensions would allow you to sharpen the comparative argument.
This need for a more narrow focus and a stronger analytical integration is also visible in the discussion of learning. The main analysis focuses almost entirely on games as designed systems, whereas the section on debriefing shifts attention to how learning is shaped through pedagogical framing, discussion, and reflection. This is an important point, but it is not fully integrated into the analytical framework and remains only loosely connected to the categories used earlier in the paper. You may consider either strengthening this integration by showing more explicitly how debriefing interacts with the design dimensions you analyse, or narrowing the scope to focus more consistently on design elements.
Overall, the manuscript presents a well-suited research design and engages with a topic that fits well within the scope of the Special Issue. With clearer methodological positioning, a more focused analytical scope, and deeper engagement with the issues identified, the study has the potential to make a substantial contribution to Geoscience Communication.
Best wishes,
Charlott Sellberg