Stefan Werning

In recent years, serious energy games (SEGs) garnered increasing attention as an innovative and effective approach to tackling energy-related challenges. This review delves into the multifaceted landscape of SEG, specifically focusing on their wide-ranging applications in various contexts. The study investigates potential enhancements in user engagement achieved through integrating social connections, personalization, and data integration. Among the main challenges identified, previous studies overlooked the full potential of serious games in addressing emerging needs in energy systems, opting for oversimplified approaches. Further, these studies exhibit limited scalability and constrained generalizability, which poses challenges in applying their findings to larger energy systems and diverse scenarios. By incorporating lessons learned from prior experiences, this review aims to propel the development of SEG toward more innovative and impactful directions. It is firmly believed that positive behavior changes among individuals can be effectively encouraged by using SEG.

This article analyses the disruptive potential of Valve’s game distribution platform, Steam, focusing specifically on how Steam has evolved into a de facto online social network and how Valve uses constant feature changes as part of its corporate rhetoric. Despite its profound influence on the video game industry, scholarly inquiry into Steam has focused on analyses of user or value creation. However, Steam arguably derives its long-term disruptive potential from combining the gamification of digital distribution with the formation of ephemeral public spheres around the games that it distributes, thereby becoming a de facto online social network. To investigate this strategy, the article employs a historically comparative affordance analysis, drawing on a small data set of Steam blog posts and tech blog coverage from 2007 to 2018 to map patterns of affordance change.