Blue Gold, Game-Based Learning to Encourage Sustainable Consumption: The Case of Mobile Phones

Abstract

The concept of sustainability is different in industry and in nature. In the case of mobile phones, the constant replacement by new models increases waste to ecologically unbearable limits. To encourage responsible and sustainable consumption, we designed an educational game in a role-play format, called Blue Gold. The objective was to make known the use of cobalt in the production of mobile phones and the methods and people involved in its extraction. We present three characters that each participant could become during the game: a Congolese girl, a Congolese boy, or an American boy. Through socio-educational dynamics of experiential learning, 308 undergraduate students and 31 of their teachers participated in the game. We set out to investigate whether knowing the reality of child labor and violence against women happening in cobalt mines could have any impact on consumer behavior, if the effect of the game could delay the desire to purchase a mobile phone or refuse to buy a new one. The results obtained revealed the influence of the role assumed in the game and the gender of the participants. They also revealed that this online role-playing game is effective in encouraging a more sustainable consumption behavior.

1. Introduction

As a consequence of the incorporation of technology into our daily lives, we are all witnessing how digital devices have decisively changed our way of relating and interacting with others. We increasingly use and consume digital devices with greater intensity to interact with the work and social environment. From all of these technological tools and gadgets, the mobile phone is the flagship and its market is a good example of this: according to data from International Data Corporation (https://www.idc.com/, accessed on 14 November 2023), in just 3 months, between July and September 2020 alone, 353.6 million phones were sold. There are more than 6.5 billion mobile phones worldwide [1], and the number of mobile phone subscriptions keeps growing every year. In our digital society [2,3], mobile phones have displaced computers as a computing resource, and they have become an essential tool for millions of people around the world. As a consequence of this, mobile telephony is in the ranking of the most demanded and purchased technology products worldwide. The Global E-waste Monitor [4] stated that there were more mobile phones on the entire planet than humans who used them. Around 90% of the current world’s population has a smartphone. This is not a product intended to be used for a long time. In fact, it seems that as soon as it is purchased, its utilities quickly become obsolete. This is what happens with planned obsolescence. In the case of mobile phones, they are declared obsolete when their warranty period ends or when they no longer receive software updates. The Dutch Consumer Association (https://www.consumentenbond.nl/, accessed on 6 October 2023) estimates the average lifespan of a smartphone at 2.5 years. However, social media [5] and especially the marketing campaigns from the companies that sell them stimulate the reduction of these deadlines by acting on the consumer’s decision-making process [6,7], creating the need to change mobile phones whenever a new edition of the different models is released. The stimulus–response on the consumer to mobilize a change or new purchase is multidimensional: a new model is presented with a more attractive design that favors the feeling that the previous one is outdated; or a new operating system or a new update is introduced that is incompatible with the old model. Obviously, no company tries to sell a product that will never have to be replaced again. In any case, the certain fact is that their sales campaigns are so aggressive and creative that they achieve their goals time after time. This irrational consumption of mobile technologies leads to a series of environmental and social problems that need to be known. When consuming goods and services, we must consider not only factors such as price and quality but also others such as its components, labor and social costs in the production setting, and the consequences that their production and processing may have on the environment [8].

The education sector is immersed in the same process of increased use of mobile phones. In fact, it is difficult to find that in any of our classrooms today there is someone, whether student or teacher, who does not come to them with a mobile phone in their pocket. In the educational context before the coronavirus (bc), the benefits of mobile learning (m-learning) to develop ubiquitous learning [9] capable of facilitating access to learning and information from anywhere and at any time had already been noted, as well as its usefulness to promote self-learning and academic performance [10] and encourage the motivation of students in the teaching–learning process [11]. Having an instrument that is always on seemed to be an optimal resource for developing educational content in classrooms. Although there was reluctance among teachers due to its capacity to distract students’ attention, its use was beginning to become normalized, and its pedagogical goodness was recognized. However, at the moment, there is a heated debate in Spain about whether or not to prohibit the free use of mobile phones in schools, as other European countries have already done. It is a very controversial issue because in a very short period of time, the use of mobile phones in schools went from 0 to 100 and now it is intended to go back from 100 to 0. In any case, what is indisputable is that the global health crisis caused by “COVID-19” and the fear of spreading of infections has shown the definitive leap to the digitalization of teaching [12], at least in the university environment. From that dystopian situation (which seems to have been overcome), we can also find an opportunity to carry out educational dynamics to achieve sustainable consumption [13,14]. We need to rethink consumption habits and opt for more sustainable lifestyles, aligned with goal #12 of the Sustainable Development Goals (https://sdgs.un.org/goals, accessed on 6 October 2023) focused on ensuring sustainable consumption and production patterns.

Mobile technology would not be possible without minerals such as coltan or cobalt. These metals are extracted from conflict zones where labor is very cheap and it falls on many occasions to boys, girls, and women who are forced to work in inhumane conditions of exploitation [15,16]. The Democratic Republic of the Congo (central Africa) is the main producing country of cobalt (a ferromagnetic metal used in the manufacturing of battery electrodes) and coltan (the name given to the columbite-tantalite mineral group used to make heat-resistant capacitors in electronic devices), with about 80% of the world production of these minerals [17]; in 2022 alone, this country recorded about 4 million metric tons of cobalt (Figure 1).

Despite its great wealth potential and the rapidly growing demand for cobalt and coltan, this country is also one of the poorest in the world and one of the places on the planet where child labor exploitation is most common [18,19]. It is estimated that around 400,000 children work in the mines to extract cobalt for 10 to 12 h a day [20]. The harsh subsistence conditions in the country mean that minors are forced to work in mining deposits digging cobalt rocks with inappropriate tools and even with their own hands. This tough work, necessary to guarantee them a minimum amount of vital food, violates Article 32 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which requires the protection of minors against economic exploitation (https://www.unicef.org/child-rights-convention/convention-text (accessed on 23 September 2023)), Many of these children cannot read or write and have never gone nor will go to school [21]. In addition to the risk posed by non-existent occupational safety measures, the inhalation of toxic dust causes fatal lung diseases [22]. Furthermore, women working in cobalt mines suffer from gender inequality and are often victims of sexual violence [23].

It seems unlikely that the relentless production of mobile technology is going to stop in this post-COVID-19 era (after coronavirus, ac). Quite the opposite, as the recent emergence of artificial intelligence heralds an even greater rise in digital devices. Technological development drives consumption, but we cannot allow technology to prevail over ethics and we wonder if we can do something from the educational field to stimulate the responsible consumption [24] of these products. We could promote critical digital literacy from the classrooms that encourages ethical consumption (reduce the number of products consumed and reduce the volume of garbage and pollution that originates from their production and consumption), that motivates ecological consumption (production from the reduction, reuse, recycling, and recovery of the different products consumed), and that induces a solidarity consumption (taking into account the social relations and working conditions in which a product or service has been produced or provided). To carry this out, we think it would be necessary to adequately train students so that they can critically analyze the mobile technology that they buy, use, and easily exchange for new products. That is, we thought about whether we could design a learning situation that did not consist of an expert lecture-type dissertation supported by slides, where they could know how mobile devices are made, what materials are needed for their manufacture, where these materials come from, and who is in charge of their extraction [25].

There is a lot of information provided by the research literature, posted on the Internet, and shared in the media about the environmental impact of non-renewable sources used in the production of cell phones. There is also information, and this is even more serious, about the violation of Human Rights and the armed conflicts generated by the extraction of minerals necessary for their manufacture [26,27,28]. The educational challenge we face here is to trigger experiential learning which allows for reflection [29] and design a learning situation in which both the knowledge and the competencies to develop sustainable consumption behaviors can be promoted through self-experiences [30]. That is, the challenge is to design a learning situation where students can get involved in an activity based on a real problem that generates emotional responses, creating a learning scenario where they can analyze their immersive experience, process, and assimilate the information and knowledge they acquire, and transfer it from the game space to real life. Gamification, or playing to achieve learning outcomes [31], can be a way to achieve this. Incorporating game elements into the educational process can facilitate this cognitive progression. Supported by its high motivational power, gamification uses game dynamics to promote desired behaviors and therefore can be applied to real-world problems [32], such as to teach about environmental awareness [33], to teach about sustainability [34], or to teach about human rights [35]. Game-based learning uses a game as part of the learning process, which allows us to transform theoretical concepts into experiential content, inducing an active understanding in the participants [36]. A game is an organized rules-based system where players engage in an artificial conflict that ends with a quantifiable result [37]. Within a role-play format, the player can adopt an expected behavior related to a particular role [38]. Participants assume a different identity, and this can make it easier for them to understand the point of view of others by projecting themselves into the place of the chosen role they play [39]. Then, game-based learning could be a good educational strategy to promote environmentally friendly behavioral and attitudinal changes [40]. Handling these ideas, we designed an interactive online game named Blue Gold (https://voluntastur.org/cobalto/index.html (accessed on 10 January 2024)), referring to the bluish-gray color of cobalt and the high value of this mineral in the manufacturing of digital devices. Based on a gamified structure, the game incorporates motivational elements within a learning and social awareness framework, inviting participants, undergraduate students, and their teachers in the field of education to experience the reality of cobalt mines up close. The language of the game is Spanish, as is the context of the application. To place the players within the learning scenario from the first moment, on an overhead photograph of a cobalt mine in full activity in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, before starting the game, the participants are asked about their plans for buying/changing their mobile phone (Figure 2).

Providing information on sustainable and responsible consumption, the game can begin by choosing between being a Congolese boy or girl who works in those mines, or an American boy who wants to buy a mobile phone.

The purpose of the Blue Gold game is to teach sustainable and responsible consumption. By taking mobile phones as a case study, the research intention was aimed at analyzing the effect of the game based on gender and the relationship of the role assumed on the behavior of the participants when it comes to changing, more or less soon, their mobile phone. Among the most notable results obtained, it is highlighted that the effect of the game directly conditioned the purchasing behavior of a new mobile phone significantly more in female participants than in male participants. Playing this game completely delayed purchasing behavior among teachers and it also did so in good proportion of the students. Regarding the role assumed, this purchase deferral showed significant differences between the male and female participants depending on the character they chose to play. In summary, valuing this educational experience, it has been verified that the designed game responded effectively to the stated objective, managing to promote more conscious and sustainable consumer behavior. Also, while playing, the participants acquired knowledge, that in our opinion is necessary, about the conditions, the environment, and the people who extract cobalt, one of the essential components of mobile phones.

2. Materials and Methods

The version of the game presented here was constructed for educational settings, so we have considered the privacy and security requirements of the application [41]. To successfully implement the role-play [42], we use three main components: a scenario (in this case, the story presented in the Blue Gold game), roles/characters (the story characters described in the game and the characters assumed by the participant player), and finally, the guides/facilitators (the game-based learning design itself). Before starting the game, the player finds a question (Pre-game Q1): “When do you intend to buy a new mobile phone?” with three possible answers: “This year”; “In 2024”; and “After 2025”. Then, the game starts. The scenario setup briefly introduces the concepts of ethical, ecological, and socially responsible consumption in a single paragraph and offers two possible options to play: to be a child from the USA (as a representative of the consumer society) or from DR Congo (as representatives of child labor in a country with a very low human development index), and in the second case, to be a boy or a girl (the characters). The game’s workflow makes it easy for the player to progress through the multiple-choice answers [43] that are answered in the quiz embedded in the game [44]. On each page, the player finds photographs related to the particular subject of that page (the scenario), and a short story (the guide). Whatever the role chosen, the exposure of Congolese child miners to abuse and risks is made evident (or directly recalled for conscious American boys) at some point, including the dangerous working conditions, the health risks, and the specific abuse to miner girls and women. For the emotional implication (by proximity) of the roles in the exposure to abuse along the story, they could be ranked as Congolese girl > Congolese boy > American boy, because the Congolese girl is exposed to sexual and physical violence, the Congolese boy to physical violence, and the American boy is an observer. At the end of the game, demographic information is asked: gender, age, status (teacher or student), and the role chosen. To conclude, and to measure the effect of the game on each participant, the players are asked again (Post-game Q2) to answer the same question from the beginning about when they intend to buy a new mobile phone (Post-game Q1), with the same options.

Once the interactive game was designed, a group of experts (N = 10) analyzed its content [45] to ensure that the Blue Gold game could provide a pedagogical learning experience about responsible, conscious, and sustainable consumption and that it complied with the basic principles of ethics in scientific research [46]. To ensure its usefulness, before its application, a pilot test of the Blue Gold game was carried out to test its efficiency in consumer behavior and its informative content in didactic communication. The target sample was university adults related to diagnostic and research methods and the educational field. As a result of this preliminary evaluation, both the structure and the final contents of the game were established. The population to which the game was intended to be applied were university undergraduates in the educational field (young people between 18 and 20 years old) and their teachers (adults between 40 and 60 years old). In the classrooms of the Faculty of Education of the University of Oviedo (northwest Spain), students and teachers were informed about the characteristics of the game, the objective of the research, and the voluntary nature of the experience. Also, they were informed that the only personal data they needed to provide would be their age, condition (students or teachers), and their perceived gender (man/woman/non-binary), and that everyone, whether they participated in the research or not, could have access to the results obtained. All who consented were provided with the link to the game. The participants who voluntarily wanted to get involved in the research and finally had access to the game and completed it were university students of Pedagogy and Primary Education (N = 308, 79.2% women) and their teachers (N = 31, 66.7% women). They were recruited during face-to-face classes at the University of Oviedo (Spain).

To analyze the effect of the Blue Gold game, the following variables were considered: behavioral intention, knowledge, gender, emotional implication of the role, and age group (teachers versus students). The effect of the game to reduce mobile phone consumption by postponing (“Delay of mobile phone acquisition”) or directly not purchasing a new one (“Refusing to buy”) was measured from the difference in years between Pre-game Q1 and Post-game Q2. The knowledge about the problem of child labor in cobalt mines and the excessive consumption of mobile phones was measured from the number of correct answers in the multiple-choice questions and specified within the period chosen to buy a new mobile.

3. Results

The roles chosen in the game by students and teachers are displayed in

Table 1. Participant role choices in the Blue Gold game.

Role	Students			Teachers
	Female	Male	Non-Binary	Female	Male
Congolese boy	0.045	0.556	1	0.048	0.1
Congolese girl	0.824	0.254	0	0.952	0.3
American boy	0.131	0.19	0	0	0.6
N	244	63	1	21	10

. The role choice was significantly different between genders for both students and teachers. On the students’ side, male students chose more frequently to play as a Congolese boy, while female students preferred a Congolese girl or an American boy role, and the non-binary person in the sample chose the Congolese boy role (Contingency Chi square = 115.38, 4 degrees of freedom, p < 0.001). In the teachers’ group, all the female teachers except one chose to become the Congolese girl, while most male teachers preferred to play as an American boy and only one chose to adopt the Congolese boy role (Chi Square = 16.77, 2 degrees of freedom, p < 0.001).

The general effect of the game on the group of students was an increase in the proportion of participants intending not to buy a new mobile phone in the next two years. That proportion was significantly higher after playing the game (Figure 3), with less than 50% of the participants before playing and more than 70% after. The difference in the proportion of students intending to buy a new phone the same year, after one year, or at least after two years was highly significant before and after playing the game (Chi2 = 36.01, 2 d.f., p < 0.001).

For the variable “Delay of mobile phone acquisition”, women and men reacted differently depending on the role played. The change between the pre- and the post-test shown in Figure 1 was really due to the effect of the game on female participants. Women similarly delayed the intended purchase with the three roles, but men only delayed the intended acquisition after playing as the Congolese boy, while they even advanced it when playing any of the other two roles (Figure 4). In the representation of the average delay in acquiring a new mobile phone obtained by role and gender, we see that men who play the role of the Congolese girl and the American boy even advance the purchase of a mobile phone.

Two-way ANOVA (

Table 2. Two-way ANOVA testing the effect of gender and role in the intention to delay the acquisition of a new mobile phone.

	Sum of Sqrs	df	Mean Square	F	p (Same)
Gender	4.923	1	4.923	6.215	0.013
Role	0.948	2	0.474	0.598	0.55
Interaction	5.259	2	2.629	3.319	0.038
Within	238.442	301	0.792
Total:	249.98	306

) showed a significant effect of the gender (F_{1, 301} = 6.215 with p = 0.013) but not of the role (F_{2, 301} = 0.598, p = 0.55 > 0.05 n.s.) in this variable. This means that while the three roles were similarly useful in delaying the intention to buy a new phone (see the overall change in Figure 2), women’s consumption behavior intention changed significantly more than that of men. The interaction between gender and role was significant, as expected from the opposite effect of the Congolese girl and especially the American boy roles in women and men. The global effect in males was positive (delaying the intention to buy by a mean of two years, SD) because most males chose the role of the Congolese boy. In any case, what is significant in explaining differences between participants in the delay in purchasing mobile phones (consumption moderation) is gender, not the role adopted. The Blue Gold game seems to have more of an effect on women than on men, while the difference between roles is not (anyone as a whole can improve sustainable consumption).

The Blue Gold game is also successful among teachers. The results obtained show that they significantly delay the purchase of new mobile phones (Figure 5). Regarding the age variable, there is no significant difference between teachers and students. The effect of the game is similar in each group. In other words, the Blue Gold game is successful at any age.

4. Discussion

We have a serious problem with E-waste. According to the United Nations, 61.3 million tons of electronic waste are discarded per year (https://weee-forum.org/iewd-about/, accessed on 14 August 2023). WEE forum, a non-profit association related to the management of E-waste equipment, points out that there are about 16 billion phones around the world, of which 5.3 billion end up in the trash (https://weee-forum.org/, accessed on 10 September 2023). So, considering our capacities as educators, we try to contribute to the reduction of this waste and to the training of conscious, responsible, and sustainable consumption. With this objective, we designed a learning-based digital game in a role-play format that we call Blue Gold, with a quiz embedded within. In a gamified structure of activities that acquire the properties of a game, we raised an environmental problem [47]. We thought that, if consumers are well informed about the production characteristics of the phones they buy, they could act responsibly by opting for sustainable consumption behaviors. Thus, the potential players, through the life experiences of a Congolese or American child, could learn what the extraction process of minerals such as cobalt (essential in mobile phone manufacturing) is like. Likewise, within the framework of the game, they could also witness the impact of child labor and the violence exerted against women who work in these mines. The specific learning situations in this game were designed to activate prior knowledge [48]. All participants had an educational experience that could be recovered, because in all European classrooms, regardless of the specific school stage, there is talk of recycling and sustainable consumption. Even so, the perspective of using this educational game to motivate learning [49] lies in the hypothesis that it can involve participants in what is relevant here: child labor, gender violence, and waste generation.

The participants, 308 undergraduate students of Pedagogy and Primary Education and 31 of their teachers, faced the question of buying or delaying the purchase of a new mobile phone influenced by the Blue Gold game. Among teachers, the effect of the game delayed the intention to buy new mobile phones. In the student group, the proportion of those who would delay the intention to buy a new mobile phone in the next two years was higher after than before playing the game. The role and gender variables had a lot of influence on the results obtained. In the case of role assumption, female participants delayed the planned purchase regardless of whether they adopted any of the three roles. This is consistent with a greater tendency toward sustainable consumption behavior among women. It seems that women have greater environmental awareness and adopt more sustainable behaviors than men [50]. In fact, linking gender and behavior in sustainable consumption, women show a higher level of sustainable consumption both in their general behavior and in their tendency to reuse products [51,52] and they are more critical of the processes and materials used by companies in the manufacturing of products and their impact on the environment [53]. For their part, men only delayed the planned purchase after playing as a Congolese boy. Perhaps identifying with the character helped give them perspective and facilitated more empathy towards the character [54]. Whatever the case, what has been confirmed is that the difference between the participants in the delay in purchasing mobile phones (consumption moderation) is gender, not the role adopted. The Blue Gold game seems to have more of an effect on women than on men. While all three roles were equally useful in delaying the intention to purchase a new mobile phone, women’s consumer behavior intention changed significantly more than men’s.

5. Conclusions

The results obtained are consistent with the planned training objectives and demonstrate several things. First of all, and most importantly, the designed online role-playing game is effective in encouraging a more sustainable consumption behavior in the group of participants involved in our research. This role-playing game is based on consecutive options in which whoever adopts a Congolese role is exposed to calamities, while whoever adopts an American role is not exposed to them, although they do end up getting to know the situation of violence against women and the hardships of child labor. To this is added, in our opinion, another substantial result: there is no significant difference between roles, but there is a very large gender effect. Finally, it has been shown that the Blue Gold game also has a significant effect on teachers. Therefore, it is an effective online role-playing game at any age (at least among those involved in higher education). Serious games aim to influence the attitudes and behaviors of the participant players. Although there are educators who question the impact of the use of games on effective learning [55], the truth is that games involve students and provide better learning results [56], and there is extensive literature that presents successful experiences of using serious games in the educational field [57]. In a later stage of the research, it will be interesting to consider its effect between secondary school adolescents and their teachers. It would also be interesting to improve some of the limitations of our research, such as testing the game with other participant profiles, applying an English version of the Blue Gold game in a multilingual context, or re-administering the in-game questionnaire to the same participants after some time.

As a conclusion of this whole process, we dare to suggest that the consumer can carry out simple and very effective actions in favor of sustainability, such as taking advantage of the entire useful life of the mobile phone, recycling the cell phone when it does not work, or buying mobile phones from companies with social responsibility that advocate for ethical and sustainable production, among others. Regarding the educational space, we need to continue delving into the benefits and difficulties of education for responsible and sustainable consumption [58], sharing with students what we said at the beginning of this article: that responsible consumption is ethical, it is ecological, and it is supportive.