Immersive experiences are increasingly used to communicate environmental impacts. Such experiences could be useful in raising engagement and knowledge of the general public regarding greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. However, it is not clear if increasing the degree of gamification or enacted interactions in such immersive experiences could increase the memorability of GHG emissions data. To answer this question, we designed a virtual reality experience allowing people to explore GHG emissions of daily actions with various degrees of enacted and gamified interactions. We conducted a controlled and pre-registered study with 63 participants to understand how quiz-based gamification and enactment could influence GHG emissions memorability, intrinsic motivation and flow. We found evidence for our immersive design to increase general public knowledge about GHG emissions, whatever the condition. However, we found no strong evidence for an effect of enactment on GHG emissions memorability, while we found slight evidence for a small positive effect of quiz-based gamification. Moreover, we showed a positive effect of enactment on flow and intrinsic motivation. This study contributes to the understanding of how immersive visualizations can be optimized for climate education, highlighting the nuanced roles of gamification and enactment in shaping user engagement and knowledge gains. Supplementary material available at https://osf.io/48pnr.

Following the Quantified Self (QS) movement, sports apps increasingly adopt self-tracking technologies that offer data-driven insights into personal competencies to enhance self-efficacy. However, sustained engagement with QS technology remains challenging, as interpreting data is complex. One potential solution is to make QS data more meaningful to users. To address this, we present a player card feature within a QS sports app, incorporating a personalized avatar to enhance users’ enjoyment, data meaningfulness, and self-efficacy to promote continued use. We evaluate the app through a field experiment in a soccer context to examine the impact of the avatar feature. Results indicate that avatar identification positively affects self-efficacy, data meaningfulness, continued use intention, and enjoyment, though enjoyment did not impact continued use. Our findings suggest that (1) avatar identification can be enhanced through personalization, (2) personalized avatars effectively boost self-efficacy, and (3) sustained engagement may rely more on meaning than on enjoyment alone.

Social performance situations, often crucial and expected in today’s work contexts, can be perceived as highly challenging and stressful. Therefore, experiencing anxiety in public speaking situations can have a negative impact on individuals’ working lives and career prospects. Virtual reality environments offer novel means to practise public speaking anywhere, safely and privately, and to replace simulations with more dynamic and innovative training environments unavailable in real-life scenarios. Additionally, these innovative tools and methods could also be used during virtually implemented real-life interactions as working conditions are increasingly shifting towards more technology-mediated forms. This research investigates the potential for a virtual reality height manipulation (i.e. raised or lowered point-of-view) to influence individuals’ self-statements during a stressful speech task and, subsequently, their personal performance evaluation. Results of a strictly controlled, between-subject experiment indicate that participants perceiving themselves taller evaluated their speech performance more positively and experienced fewer negative self-statements during the speech task. Furthermore, perceived tallness was associated with lower levels of public speaking anxiety. These results suggest that even a simple, visual first-person perspective manipulation of virtual reality environment influences individuals’ personal evaluation of their own performance and potentially helps them improve their task-related cognitive processes.

We share an emergent repository of nature-entangled methods-to-be shared, experimented with, and discussed during a conference workshop. We present them in-use, as they are in formation. We do not seek to theorise or even fully articulate these methods-to-be. Rather, to make them approachable and actionable for others by showing them not fully polished. By doing this, we advocate for increased transparency in the difficulties of creating new methods, techniques, tools, and approaches. Our contribution is threefold: we provide 1) an annotated portfolio of methods-to-be; 2) illustrative examples of how cross-pollination of these methods can enrich their situated use; and 3) a discussion of ways to further articulate the methods and deepen reflection on their roles in nature-entangled design processes.

Climate change is one of humankind's grand challenges, and how we think about it influences how we perceive its risks and act. Understanding people's mental models of climate change (that is, how they internally represent it) and potentially challenging and changing them can be a fruitful avenue towards engagement. However, our understanding of how games can affect climate change mental models is limited, especially in the lack of control conditions with comparable content. In this experiment, participants created cognitive maps of climate change before and after experiencing an immersive VR game, a desktop PC game, or a text with graphs. We show that all conditions improved the quality, focus, and systems orientation of cognitive maps, but no significant differences were found between groups. The intervention effectively increased the salience of issues such as health and biodiversity impacts, even though changes were limited in scope. The game was on average more enjoyable than the text, with the VR version significantly more so than the other two conditions. The findings suggest that games can be a viable and attractive communication and learning method where engagement is a struggle. We provide avenues for future research and, especially, game design in this area.

In recent years, extended reality (XR) technology has seen a rise in use in environmental subjects, i.e., climate change or biodiversity loss, as a potential tool to inform and engage the public with current and future environmental issues. However, research on the potential of XR technology for environmental sustainability is still in the early stages, and there is no clear synthesis of the methods studied in this field. To provide a clearer view of existing approaches and research objectives, we systematically reviewed current literature dealing with XR use in environmental topics. Although the results indicate that the volume of literature exploring XR in environmental applications is increasing, empirical evidence of its impact is limited, hindering the possibility of presently drawing significant conclusions on its potential benefits. Based on our analyses, we identified thematic, theoretical, and methodological knowledge gaps and provide a guideline to aid future research in the field.

Widespread climate change engagement is needed to confront our current environmental crises, but it remains difficult to attain. Methods such as visualizations and experiential learning activities, including games and gamification, have been proposed to engage citizens beyond what generic and one-way information sharing can, but rigorous studies comparing the effects of game-based learning with traditional methods are rare. Therefore, this study investigates the effects of a serious game vs. control on learning outcomes related to climate change concepts. We conducted an experiment involving N=105 participants randomly assigned to two treatment groups (a desktop screen-based video game and an immersive VR version of the same game) and a control (a text with charts) and investigated the differences between pre- and post-intervention measures of knowledge. The results show that all three conditions had a large effect on learning, but there were no significant improvement differences between groups. Therefore, video games, either on desktop or virtual reality, may be as effective as more traditional instructional materials. Based on detailed observations of the questionnaire data, we also provide game design recommendations. Future studies could focus on specific features of learning and cognitive engagement and expand this experimental design to affect and behavior.

Location-based multiplayer games such as Pokémon GO are tied to real-world locations. Past research has demonstrated that, consequently, these games influence where players move. In order to explore what dynamics in these games incentivize travel to specific places or areas, we engaged in interviews with active players. We discovered 11 unique game dynamics, which could be positioned under three overarching themes: (1) the playing field, as determined by the placement of points of interest, the players' habitat and their surroundings; (2) the player communities and real life relationships, which motivated and directed the playing; and (3) coincidental motivational support, which highlighted how location-based games offer multi-layered motivation for players to travel to, and engage with, specific real-world locations. Our study contributes to the fields of gamified human mobility and human-nature interaction by elucidating how playful technologies can influence where and when people move.

Games are considered promising for engaging people with climate change. In virtual worlds, players can adopt empowering roles to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and/or adapt to climate impacts. However, the lack of a comprehensive exploration of existing climate-related identities and actions prevents understanding their potential. Here, we analyze 80 video games and classify avatar identities, or expected player roles, into six types. Climate selves encourage direct life changes; climate citizens are easy to identify with and imitate; climate heroes are inspirational figures upholding environmental values; empowered individuals deliberate to avoid a tragedy of the commons; authorities should consider stakeholders and the environment; and faction leaders engage in bi- or multilateral relations. Adaptation is often for decision-making profiles, while empowered individuals, authorities, and faction leaders usually face conflicting objectives. We discuss our results in relation to avatar research and provide suggestions for researchers, designers, and educators.

Games have been used for utilitarian purposes since at least the 1960s, with gamification pursuing game-like experiences in areas such as education, health, and sustainability. While these methods generally attempt to improve life for players, a central and underexplored issue is the friction between a design that wants players to attain a utilitarian outcome, such as learning, and players who often strive for self-directed play. Based on data collected from user testing of a digital serious game and following an inductive process, we created a thematic framework that focuses on the frictions and tensions that may arise between design and player. This framework may be used to understand how players engage holistically with serious games, but also to improve such games to maximize engagement with the content while acknowledging and allowing for player agency and emergent behavior.

Forests are, both culturally and ecologically, one of the most important environments on our planet. As such, there are countless representations of them - with Digital Games being no exception. In this paper we adopt the perspective of ecocriticism, which regards the analysis of the textual portrayal of physical environments of the natural world. In particular, we propose here a framework for the analysis of forest representations in digital games, mindful of the many different layers that coexist together: cultural, discursive, representational and ludic. In order to test our framework and to showcase its potential, in the last section we present a brief analysis of the slicing game Jack Lumber and of the ideological tensions that emerge from the game.

Video games have risen as a popular medium with the potential to become a powerful tool for public climate change engagement. However, little is known about how existing digital games can fulfill this role. This study systematically compiles 150 video games that represent climate change, including serious (n = 109) and for entertainment (n = 41). The games are analyzed by adapting an existing framework (15 dimensions: achievable, challenging, concrete, credible, efficacy-enhancing, experiential learning, feedback-oriented, fun, identity-driven, levelling-up, meaningful, narrative-driven, reward-driven, simulating, social) and statistically compared. The analysis reveals that most games comply with most recommended attributes, but credibility, achievability, meaningfulness, and social features are uncommon or rare. Statistical results comparing serious games and games for entertainment associate six attributes with serious games (achievable, challenging, credible, efficacy-enhancing, experiential learning, feedback-oriented), and one (narrative-driven) with games for entertainment. The findings suggest that researchers would benefit from widening their lens to detect previously overlooked opportunities for game-based climate change engagement, communication, and education. The study also provides a systematic mapping of extant games depicting climate change for interested developers, designers and educators.