Operationalizing the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals: a Game Jam Experience

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.17083/er29ww90

Keywords:

Game Jams, SDGs, Sustainable Development, Meaningful Games, Game Design, Education

Abstract

This study investigates the educational potential of Game Jams (GJs) for promoting critical engagement with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) among undergraduate videogame students. Therefore, it presents and evaluates the 2022 Meaningful Game Jam (MGJ22), a five-day, SDG-themed intervention involving 31 students who developed ten original games. Employing a mixed-methods design, the study integrates questionnaire data and a formal analysis of the games using three complementary frameworks: SDG thematic areas, games for civic learning, and moral learning design principles. Findings explore the potential of GJs in fostering interdisciplinary learning, critical reflection, and civic awareness through collaborative game creation. While students gravitated towards environmental and economic SDGs, themes related to dignity and partnership remained underexplored, revealing key gaps in thematic engagement and awareness. The analysis also highlighted discrepancies between intended learning goals and game mechanics, highlighting the importance of thoughtful design guidance. This work contributes novel insights to game-based learning by demonstrating how GJs can serve as pedagogical tools, helping students rethink their roles, both as designers and as citizens. Ultimately, the study offers evidence-based recommendations for implementing meaningful GJs in higher education, reinforcing their value in cultivating ethical awareness and promoting sustainable development through games.

Author Biographies

  • Filipe Luz, Lusófona University, HEI-Lab

    Filipe Luz holds a PhD in Communication Sciences by the New University of Lisbon being Associate Professor at School of Communication, Architecture, Arts and Information Technologies of University Lusófona. Filipe Luz has a strong experience at coordination level, being actually the Director of the Erasmus Mundus Joint Master Degree in games: REPLAY, director of the MSc studies "Game Design and Playable Media"; director of "Videogames" BA studies; vice-director of Communication Design BA; and is also member of the direction board of R&D Unit "Hei-Lab - Digital Human Environment Interface Labs".
    Filipe Luz is External Assessor at doctoral programme "Performative and Media-based Practices" at Stockholm University of Arts (Sweden), participates in academic juries and supervises doctoral and master's thesis. He lectures digital post-production for film, television, games, and animation, and also does research activities in R&D projects of communication science, Design and arts. His work at MovLab (Laboratory of Interactions and Interfaces), where he integrates technologies such as Motion Capture, Animation, VR or Stereoscopic Photography, it's an example of the cross-media projects that evolve him in academic or professional work for the Communication, Cultural and Creative Industries or communication areas.

    Filipe Luz is the Principal Investigator and Co-Investigator in several International Projects, such as the European Joint Master Degree RE_PLAY (n.101128161, 2023-2028, 4.4M), EPIC-WE (HORIZON-CL2-2022-HERITAGE-01-09 n. 101095058, 2023-26, 3.0M), GameIn (2022.07939.PTDC, 2023-25, 250K), PlayersALL (EXPL/COM-OUT/0882/2021, 2022-23, 60k), TEGA Training the Educators to Facilitate the Teaching and Assessment of Abstract Syllabus by the Use of Serious Games (2020-1-UK01-KA203-079248, 250K), Erasmus+ ID-Games Co-Create assistive games for people with Intellectual Disability to enhance their inclusion (2019-1-EL01-KA204-062517, 250K), Erasmus + Game-Based Learning For Deaf Students (LISBOA-01-0145-FEDER-032022, 250K), Erasmus+ Youth for Youth (2020-2-HU01-KA205- 079126, 250K), among others.

  • Pedro M. Fernandes, Lusófona University, HEI-Lab

    Pedro M. A. Fernandes is currently enrolled in the PhD in Media Art and Communication, having been awarded a FCT-funded PhD studentship for his proposal which aims to look into the game design experiments that caracterize 2010s' new wave of independent horror games. He has a Bachelor’s degree in Videogames (final grade of 15), and a Master’s degree in Game Design and Playful Media which he finished in 2023 with a final grade of 18. His thesis, “Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment to Improve Player Experience in Games for Rehabilitation”, received a final evaluation of 19/20. As complementary education, he completed the Game Creator’s Odyssey program, created through a partnership between Concordia University (Canada) and the games publisher Ubisoft, obtaining a certificate for the game design methodologies employed at Ubisoft and other high-budget studios: Rational Game Design (2020) and Rational Level Design (2021). He currently works as a student researcher at Lusófona University’s HEI-Lab. Through the Bachelor’s degree, he was introduced to game development, learning several tools that are part of game development pipelines, including programing (C#), 3D modeling (Blender), sound design (Avid ProTools), UI (Adobe Photoshop/Illustrator), and development tools such as the Unity game engine. In the Master’s degree, he expanded his knowledge in game design, developing both analog, digital, and alternative controller (alt.ctrl) games that explored different design challenges as part of the course’s program. One of these projects, the alt.ctrl. game 'HexPong', has been featured in several conferences and events, including international games research conferences such as FDG (2023) and IEEE CoG (2023), and the European Researchers’ Night (2022 and 2023). During the Master’s degree, in 2021, he would be awarded a research scholarship to work at Lusófona University’s HEI-Lab research unit. Since then, he has worked in the FCT-financed PlayersAll research project (ref. EXPL/COM-OUT/0882/2021), designing a virtual reality game to complement upper-limb rehabilitation and gathering game design patterns that can assist in creating adaptive systems in games, the Horizon Europe-financed EPIC-WE project (ref. Nº101095058), conducting a systematic literature review (spanning from 2002 to 2023) on game jam organization practices, and the FCT-financed GameIN project (ref. 2022.07939.PTDC) adapting commercial analog games and creating playful activities that are accessible for people with intellectual disabilities to promote inclusion - contributing to the creation of a game kit that facilitates the creation of more of these activities. He has presented articles at some of the main conferences for games research such as Foundations on Digital Games and IEEE’s Conference on Games related to both these research projects and his own PhD work.

  • Pedro P. Neves, Lusófona University, HEI-Lab

    Pedro Pinto Neves holds a PhD in Media and Communication (thesis on Game Design and Agency in games, Universidade do Minho, 2017) and holds a Master in Arts degree in Digital Game Design from the University College for the Creative Arts at Farnham, UK. Pedro is an Auxiliary Professor at the Lusófona University Lisbon Campus, where he teaches game design and interactive naerratives in the videogames undergraduate degree and in the masters in Game Design at the School of Communication, Arts and Information. He is the co-director of the masters in Game Design. Pedro has worked as an editor and scientific panel member of a number of publications and conferences in game design and serious games.

    As an integrated member of the Human-Enviroment Interaction (HEI-Lab) Research Unit at and the Games and Social Impact Media Research Lab (GLOW) at Lusófona University, Pedro researches serious (or applied) games in their aspects of game design research and therapeutic and critical applications. Pedro is the Principal Investigator of the PlayersAll: media agency and empowerment funded exploratory project (FCT, ref. EXPL/COM-OUT/0882/2021), which researches how therapeutic games can better leverage game-like qualities in a VR therapy game towards critical game literacy and broader impacts for therapy games. Pedro is additionally a researcher in the GameIn, Games Inclusion Lab: Participatory Media Creation Processes for Accessibility funded project (FCT, ref. 2022.07939.PTDC) which works to overcome medical models of disability and advance inclusivity in getting people with intellectual disability to take charge of their own use of games. Pedro has been a part of the TEGA (Project No. 2020-1-UK01-KA203-079248), Youth for Youth (Project No. 020-2-HU01-KA205-079126) and ID-Games (Project No. 2019-1-EL01-KA204-062517) Erasmus+ projects.

    Pedro Pinto Neves is part of the FilmEU - European University for Film and Media Arts project. The project is made up of a consortium of four european universities led by Lusófona University, and is readying 4 different EMJMD (European Joint Master Degrees). Within FilmEU Pedro Pinto Neves is part of the team more directly involved with establishing an Erasmus Mundus european Games Design and Production Master's. This follows from Pedro's ongoing work as part of the team developing a new portuguese master's degree in Game Design, Research, and Production at ULHT.

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Published

2026-01-30

Issue

Vol. 13 No. 1, 2026

Section

Articles

License

Copyright (c) 2026 Filipe Luz, Pedro M. Fernandes, Carla Sousa, Wilson Almeida, Pedro P. Neves

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

IJSG copyright information is provided here.

How to Cite

Operationalizing the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals: a Game Jam Experience. (2026). International Journal of Serious Games, 13(1), 199-221. https://doi.org/10.17083/er29ww90