Educating society about energy transition through excitement of a game? Why not!

The increase of energy consumption especially in the form of oil is being an issue for certain countries including Indonesia. Within the rise of 3.99% of energy consumption annually, transportation sector having the largest portion of energy consumption (Indonesia Outlook Energy, 2016). There are 17.523.967 vehicles in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, with 74.66% of the numbers are motorbikes and 18.64% are cars. The use of oil in most land transportation vehicles has lead oil to be the most used fuel by the market share of 32% compared to other type of fuel. Unfortunately, the oil production in Indonesia has been constantly decreased within 4.41% per year. It leads Indonesia to be the net importer of oil and depending on the oil supply by other countries. The condition of being net importer of oil having many effects of short and long run in Indonesia’s economic. the respond to the increase of oil consumption, the government releasing an energy diversification program to reduce oil consumption by substitute the oil to other type of fuel like gas, biofuel, renewable energy and many others. One of the diversification plan is the conversion of oil to natural gas program. This program has been conducted since 1987, however until 2011 it only achieved 0.03% conversion rate. Based on the study from Bureau of Oil and Gas, one of the success key for conversion from oil to gas program is through education and socialization to the society. Conversion from oil to gas is a kind of energy transition which is defined by Chappin (2011) as the socio-technical transition in the scale of sector. To do the simulation about energy transition physical and social components from the energy transition system needs to be captured.

To accelerate the process of energy transition in terms of education to the society, the learning instrument of education need to be designed as interesting as possible. One of learning instrument type is through serious simulation game. Serious simulation game has purposes of knowledge transfer, skill development and social or individual behavior change through persuasive content. Thus, using the framework of Triadic Game Design proposed by Harteveld (2011), a game about energy transition is developed by balancing the element of reality, meaning and play.

Transergy is a digital serious simulation game about energy transition as the learning instrument for public education. The development of the game is in accordance with the method of game development by Duke and Geurst (2004). There are four phases to create a game start from setting up the stage for project, clarifying the problem, designing the game, developing the game and the deployment of the game. The first phase has been accommodated by above mentioned paragraph. The second phase is about defining the learning purpose and learning point through game conceptualization and learning model. Transergy game has a concept of simulating the mobilization when using oil as the fuel and then giving the explanation about conversion from oil to natural gas. After the player understand about the conversion, there are some given conditions that will affect the player decision to convert to natural gas. The comparison of expense, carbon emission, health and social indicator before and after the conversion is displayed to give a better comprehension about the advantages of having conversion.

Based on the game conceptualization and learning model above, Transergy game is developed using Netbeans IDE 8.2 to create the interface of the game. There are 12 main activities in the game that including all learning purposes and learning points. In this game, the player will have simulation of their mobility in weekdays, weekend and vacation period. For each of the simulation, the player will know their annual performance of fuel consumption, expenses, carbon emission, health and social indicator. This is the concept of self-simulation to make the player aware of how much energy they have consumed and the effect to the environment, health and social aspects. This simulation also bridging them to the needs of the energy transition from oil to natural gas.

After simulating their mobilization, through this game the player will learn about energy transition including the component of conversion, infrastructure, benefit and the government target of conversion from oil to natural gas. Within understanding about conversion of oil to natural gas, the players will make a decision about on which condition that trigger them to do the conversion. From the decision that made, the player will analyze and evaluate their decision by player performance. There will be significant difference of before and after doing the conversion. Thus, the player will understand about why the need to do the conversion and the benefit of doing conversion from oil to natural gas.

This Research is Conducted by Octika Adinda Putri, Arry Rahmawan and Akhmad Hidayatno