Play secret agent in a mobile game
Computers and mobile phones are a natural part of young people’s everyday life. By developing a mobile game, Power Agent, we wanted to examine whether young people could be encouraged to save energy. We employed a unique blend of game and reality known as pervasive games.




The player is a secret energy agent with a mobile phone as his/her main tool. The agent is reached on this phone by his/her controller, Mr Q, who allocates assignments designed to save the world from an energy crisis. All the assignments focus on saving energy in the home. One example of an assignment might be to save energy by using an electric kettle instead of the stove top to boil water. The mobile phone connects to the household’s remotely read electricity meter, enabling us to measure how much electricity each household has saved.
The player chooses which agent he/she wants to be. Over the course of 11 days in March 2007, a group of young people played energy agents in their homes. Although the target group was young people, the whole family was often involved in the game. They had fun monitoring, via the mobile phone, how completion of the assignments affected the home’s energy consumption. Our study examined the relative energy consumption of the various households. We compared the values measured in the course of the game with the calculated values (based on energy consumption in the weeks before the game started). The research findings show that participants reduced their energy consumption by up to 34 per cent on average.

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