DATA - Abzu, Alba e Planet Zoo: systematic review and formal analysis on eco game mechanics

Background: Many studies aim to understand the impacts of educational games on their players and seek to establish design principles that create good experiences that teach in playful ways. However, there are digital games that do not have educational objectives as their main premises and, even so, can provide experiences in which players learn incidentally through the proposed mechanics and narratives. Planet Zoo, Alba: A Wildlife Adventure and Abzû are games in which the preservation of fauna and flora has a central narrative and is part of the main mechanics.Objective: Considering this, the present study has two main objectives. The first is to conduct a formal gameplay analysis to further investigate how some of the game design decisions of such games can provide educational experiences. The second objective is to conduct a systematic review using the PRISMA protocol to scope interventional studies using the games to promote ecological education. This review was conducted in ERIC, PsycINFO, Google Scholar and Periódicos CAPES.Results: After the inclusion criteria were applied to the screening stage, 49 articles of 316 were selected. Seven duplicates were found and excluded. Of the 42 materials screened with the application of the exclusion criteria, only 4 contained educational intervention methods and none of them used one of the three games analyzed in this study. Nonetheless, the three game titles contain interesting mechanics and have educational potential.Conclusion: The games analyzed could be used in intervention research with quantitative and qualitative approaches. It is important that these type og games continue to be investigated by game designers and ecology and biology specialists to determine the reliability of the titles establishing the limits between science and creative narrative freedom.