BeGreen
BeGreen is a game about driving in a safe and eco-friendly manner, which was developed using OpenSimulator (OpenSim). Training and early education play an important role in ensuring that tomorrow’s drivers will be familiar with eco-driving concepts, and BeGreen might be an importante tool in this matter.Instead of a typical driving simulation in which you have to obey the rules, in BeGreen you are also challenged to care about the environment. From sack curves to hills, within the city, through mountains, or in a highway, we take the player through several real world situations that have a high impact on a car’s consumption and consequently on CO2 emission.
We devised several real-world scenarios tied to concrete challenges. These are divided into three categories: game challenges, in which we provide long-term goals to the player, like driving the furthest with a limited amount of fuel; circuit challenges, that are more frequent, like anticipating the traffic situation; and the core mechanic of the game, a moment by moment challenge directly related to the control and driving of the car, like smooth deceleration and maintaining a steady speed.
The game also supports several players simultaneous, providing an inherent social factor, often desirable as it provides a basic necessity players are looking for in a game. In addition it challenges the player with real-world behaviors, resulting of the interaction among humans.
Challenges
BeGreen provides the player with three different, but interconnected, scenarios. These are the highway, the mountains and finally the urban environment found in any typical city. Each scenario supports multiple game challenges, which consist of a predefined circuit and a limited amount of fuel. Given those restrictions, the player has to travel the furthest she can under a reasonable time limit.
Highway
The highway is the easiest scenario. Here the player is expected to get used to the basic concepts of the eco-driving while the burden of the traffic rules is limited. She will be challenged to maintain a steady speed, avoid sharp braking and sudden acceleration.
Mountains
The mountain scenario (Fig. 1b) introduces the player to the second circuit challenge, the sloped roads. These are present in our everyday life but few people know exactly how to deal with them. Should we accelerate more before or during while going uphill? Should we accelerate while going downhill?
City
This final scenario (Fig. 1c) introduces the player to the bigger set of traffic rules and dynamic constraints. Not only she has to respect traffic lights but also be careful of pedestrians in the imminence of crossing the road. Cities tend to have frequent intersections and roads tend to be narrower, leading to a more erratic control of the speed of the vehicle.
In-Game feedback
Each of the challenges presented in the previous section has a certain feedback associated. Presenting the player’s performance information, in a meaningful way, is important to let her feel satisfied and improve overtime. This feedback comes in multiple modalities ranging from audio to regular HUD or in-world information.
Safe and eco-friendly driving is thus highly context-dependent. In our first iteration of the game, to avoid confusing the player, we separated the safe driving from the ecological driving. While we display purely ecological-advices using our eco-system, we reinforce safety measures through bonuses and penalties to the overall score.
