Systematic Review: Incorporating Serious Games into Public Environmental Education on Urban Wildlife Issues

Urbanization has altered the urban environment, raising concerns among management experts and the general public about the survival of urban wildlife. On the other hand, the application of serious games in the fields of environmental education and biodiversity conservation has gradually improved over the past few years with the development of XR technology, data processing, and sensing technology. It has demonstrated the ability of the serious game to intervene in a number of fields, including formal and informal education, ecology-related conservation, and scientific research, as an appealing and functionally diversified medium. This study, mainly focusing on the issues of urban wildlife, presents the current state of serious game-related applications to intervene in this field through an analysis of examples and studies in the literature. Our intention is to understand the relevance of the intervention mechanisms, game elements and other factors to the goals of the intervention, to gain insights into the opportunities, risks and challenges, and hopefully to guide the direction of future research on the design of the intervention.