The long game: gamifying sustainability education

Business schools often treat sustainability as a checkbox exercise rather than a fundamental skill for future leaders. While many institutions claim to prioritise ecological and social responsibility, their curricula frequently add sustainability as an afterthought. Instead, we set out to weave it into the fabric of business education. Here’s how.

The Road to Flourishing game, developed by Maastricht University, offers an innovative solution by immersing students in real sustainability challenges. This open-access game follows a journey narrative where players progress through five levels – efficiency, net zero, circularity, sufficiency and regeneration – moving from weak to strong sustainable business strategies, with flourishing as the ultimate goal. 

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In our courses, the game was implemented as an online, team-based activity at the end of sustainability modules, functioning as a content integration exercise rather than a formal assessment. It served primarily as a springboard for structured debriefing discussions, where students reflected on their decisions and connected the game’s scenarios to broader course concepts. 

This sequencing proved especially effective: students arrived with enough conceptual grounding to engage meaningfully with the game’s dilemmas, generating in-depth discussions that lecture-based methods rarely achieve.

What makes this game different?

The Road to Flourishing game fosters a holistic, whole-system perspective in students through several core features. 

• The game’s goal represents a shift toward a sufficiency-based economy, prioritising social well-being on a habitable Earth above purely economic demand. 
• It illustrates how organisations can drive systemic change by identifying points where small shifts produce significant impact. For instance, the game contrasts incremental interventions – such as improving energy efficiency or achieving net zero targets – with transformative strategies like sufficiency and regeneration, which address the root causes of systemic problems rather than their symptoms. This helps students recognise that meaningful sustainability outcomes often hinge on rethinking the underlying logic of business models altogether.
• Event cards introduce unpredictable disruptions like regulatory shifts or greenwashing scandals, reflecting actual sustainability challenges and demonstrating how firms operate within complex social-ecological systems.

How does it work?

Teams of two to 10 participants play, either online or in person, for approximately 90 minutes, using real-world case examples through multiple-choice and true-false cards. Unlike traditional simulations focused on deep analysis, the game requires rapid decision-making under time constraints, fostering systems thinking through intuition and collective reasoning.

What do students gain?

By actively participating in sustainability-related decisions:

• Students internalise key principles in ways traditional lectures often fail to achieve. 
• The game brings abstract concepts like regeneration and sufficiency to life, supporting collaborative learning and improving their understanding of fundamental sustainability principles. 
• This experiential approach avoids the pitfalls of abstract theorisation or moralising discourse, which can often hinder students’ receptiveness to sustainability subjects.

Areas for improvement

Despite its strengths, the Road to Flourishing game has room for refinement. The narrow scope of the case studies, primarily focusing on European and North American contexts, makes it difficult to apply globally. In our experience, students did notice this limitation, often remarking on the cultural and regulatory distance between the cases and their local context. While we did not formally modify the game’s content, during debriefing discussions we encouraged students to draw parallels with regional examples, which generated rich conversations about the specific challenges of implementing sustainability strategies in emerging economy contexts.

The decision-making mechanics could benefit from incorporating more open-ended dilemmas rather than relying primarily on predefined answer choices. This may encourage students to seek correct answers through internet searches or generative artificial intelligence instead of engaging in collaborative reasoning. In our implementation, the game was played exclusively online, in teams, under time constraints – which naturally discouraged this behaviour. 

Nevertheless, we did observe occasional attempts to look up answers. Our workaround was facilitation-based: we explicitly framed the activity as a reflective exercise from the outset, emphasising that the quality of reasoning mattered more than correctness. This reframing proved effective, although it highlights the need for clearer built-in guidance within the game itself.

The game currently runs on the Miro platform, which some of our students find challenging to navigate. A long-term solution could involve transitioning to a dedicated app or video game interface for a more intuitive, immersive experience.

Beyond implementation: moving past the facade

The Road to Flourishing game offers educators an interactive tool to integrate sustainability meaningfully into business curricula. It’s especially  effective as a content integration activity at the end of sustainability courses. 

Key implementation strategies:

• Frame the activity as experiential learning focused on reasoning, rather than focusing on correct answers
• Facilitate post-game discussions, connecting gameplay to theoretical frameworks
• Encourage students to draw parallels between game scenarios and their own regional contexts.

By actively engaging students in sustainability decision-making, the Road to Flourishing game demonstrates how experiential learning can make ecological and social responsibility foundational to business education. It prepares graduates with the collaborative problem-solving skills and ecological literacy necessary to lead organisations towards genuinely sustainable futures.

Cecilia Primogerio is the education department coordinator in the Faculty of Business Sciences and Maria Fernanda Figueroa Herrera is educator and researcher at the Center for Studies on Sustainability and Social Innovation, both at Universidad Austral.

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