Abstract
As climate change impacts increase, communicators must engage as many audiences as possible in climate action. One potentially underrated audience is video gamers. Two-thirds of Americans play video games, and video games are a potentially effective climate change communication tool. However, little research has examined whether video gamers have unique value as a target audience for climate communication, and if they do, what might be effective ways to reach them. To address this need, we use two surveys including self-identified video game players in the United States to measure their current engagement with climate change, including through video gaming. In Study 1, a nationally representative survey in the United States (N = 1,006), we found that being a video gamer was slightly positively associated with intentions to take collective action on global warming. In Study 2, restricted to gamers in the United States (N = 2,034), we found that having more friends and family who played video games, and/or being exposed to global warming content in gaming, were also positively associated with collective action intentions. These findings were consistent even after controlling for potential confounding variables such as age, political party, and global warming attitudes. Results suggest that video gamers are a worthwhile potential audience for future climate change communication, combatting the stereotype of video gamers as disengaged or antisocial, at least in the context of climate change. Our study also identifies several potential avenues for future communication with video gamers, particularly outreach to and engagement with gaming communities.
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Data availability
Replication code and data collection instruments used in Study 2 are available on the study’s OSF page at https://osf.io/2ku64/?view_only=ed865004c20745f5abf6f6e690e33042. Complete study data are available upon request.
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Acknowledgements
Thank you to Paula Escuadra with the International Game Developers Association Climate Special Interest Group; Grant Shonkweiler with the Adrienne Arsht– Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center at the Atlantic Council; Jerome Hagen with Microsoft; and Sebastien Dore with Ubisoft for providing their industry knowledge and perspective during question development.
Funding
Study 1 was funded by the Schmidt Family Foundation, the Energy Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Grantham Foundation. Study 2 was funded through the Unity Charitable Fund at the Tides Foundation. The sponsors played no role in developing, writing, or publishing this article.
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Carman: Conceptualization, Methodology, Formal analysis, Investigation, Data Curation, Writing - Original Draft, Visualization; Psaros: Conceptualization, Methodology, Investigation, Writing - Review and Editing, Funding acquisition; Rosenthal: Methodology, Investigation, Writing - Review and Editing; Marlon: Investigation, Writing - Review and Editing; Verner: Investigation, Writing - Review and Editing; Lee: Investigation, Writing - Review and Editing; Lu: Investigation, Writing - Review and Editing; Goldberg: Writing - Review and Editing; Ballew: Writing - Review and Editing; Leiserowitz: Conceptualization, Methodology, Investigation, Writing - Review and Editing, Funding acquisition.
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Carman, J.P., Psaros, M., Rosenthal, S.A. et al. Geeks versus climate change: understanding American video gamers’ engagement with global warming. Climatic Change 177, 85 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-024-03747-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-024-03747-w