In Proceedings of Foundations of Digital Games

Experiencing the environmental impact of AI with the VR serious game Outsourced

Benedikt Holland, Dmytro Maksymchuk, Saloni Saxena, Zain Munir, Žygimantas Liutkus, Tzu-Hsin Hsieh, Amir Zaidi, Marie Kegeleers, and Rafael Bidarra

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Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly reshaping daily life, yet its environmental costs such as electricity use, freshwater consumption and electronic waste, remain largely invisible to the public. This lack of awareness persists due to both limited corporate transparency and insufficient media attention. To address this gap, we present Outsourced, a virtual reality (VR) serious game designed to raise awareness on AI's environmental impact. The gameplay combines VR immersion with a dual-perspective narrative, alternating between home and workplace settings, and illustrating how both individual AI use and corporate practices jointly contribute to ecological degradation. Preliminary evaluation of the game shows that Outsourced effectively conveyed the severity of electricity, water, and e-waste involved in AI infrastructure, though participants struggled to connect their personal AI habits to these resource demands. Our work contributes a novel, immersive approach to environmental education, demonstrating how a VR serious game can make abstract ecological issues tangible and personally meaningful.

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@inproceedings{bib:holland:2026,
    author       = { Holland, Benedikt and Maksymchuk, Dmytro and Saxena, Saloni and Munir, Zain and Liutkus, Žygimantas and Hsieh, Tzu-Hsin and Zaidi, Amir and Kegeleers, Marie and Bidarra, Rafael },    
    title        = { Experiencing the environmental impact of AI with the VR serious game Outsourced },
    booktitle    = { In Proceedings of Foundations of Digital Games },
    year         = { 2026 },
    publisher    = { ACM Press },
    url          = { https://publications.graphics.tudelft.nl/papers/841 },
}