From Ecology to Emotion: How Students Translate Real‐World Knowledge Into Game Mechanics and Narratives

ABSTRACT Game design has increasingly become a fertile site for interdisciplinary learning, offering students an authentic context in which to transform complex real‐world knowledge into playable systems and stories. Yet little is known about how novice designers actually translate ecological, psychological, and cultural concepts into game mechanics and narratives. This study investigates 34 student‐produced ‘Game Concept Cards’ from a project‐based SDG‐focused game design course, analysing how learners interpret disciplinary knowledge and re‐represent it through gameplay structures. Using qualitative content analysis, the study identifies three dominant modes of translation: system simulation, in which ecological knowledge is expressed through causal loops, environmental constraints, and resource dynamics; emotional metaphor, where psychological states are rendered as symbolic puzzles, experiential distortions, or affective narrative arcs; narrative contextualization, through which cultural and historical content is transformed into quests, value conflicts, or moralised mechanics. Students' self‐reported challenges reveal persistent tensions between accuracy and playability, abstraction and clarity, and narrative–mechanic alignment. The findings contribute a theoretical model of interdisciplinary translation in novice game design and offer pedagogical implications for project‐based learning and SDG education, highlighting how games can serve as powerful vehicles for re‐encoding real‐world knowledge into meaningful interactive experiences.