Game On: Leveraging Video Games to Promote Climate Action

In this blog, Dr Amy Rodger and co-authors Dr Clayton Whittle & Mr Trevin York, explore the potential of video games - the largest entertainment medium - with their vast global reach and engaging features, to inspire environmental behaviour change.

In behavioural science, we often ask: how do we scale interventions that work? It's one thing to design and test a strategy that changes behaviour in a controlled setting. But to tackle complex challenges like the climate crisis, we need to move from shifting the behaviour of a few hundred people in a lab or field trial to creating population-level change. While system-wide reforms to policy, regulation, and infrastructure are essential, individual behaviour change also matters, as it shapes demand for sustainable alternatives and public support for systemic reform. Vast numbers of people need to increase plant-based meals, cut household waste, adopt more sustainable behaviours, and collectively advocate for the policy changes that enable transformation ^[1]. But how can we reach enough people to create a tipping point?

Commercial video games weren’t the first place Amy looked for answers. But with over 3.4 billion players worldwide, games are one of the most widely used entertainment platforms today ^[2]. Many players spend hours each week immersed in play and express as much concern about environmental issues as the general population ^[3]. Some even want to see these issues reflected in the games they play ^[4].

The video games industry's primary strength lies not only in its unprecedented reach but also in features that make games ideal platforms for behaviour change: immersive storytelling, feedback loops, repetition, and social dynamics ^[5]. They can immerse players in environmental challenges and help them understand how their daily actions contribute to those issues. Unlike traditional education, games allow people to experiment with decisions and experience their consequences in emotionally engaging narratives ^[6]. 

Recognising this potential, the Playing for the Planet Alliance (https://www.playing4theplanet.org/), an initiative facilitated by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), hosts an annual Green Game Jam. Each year, the Jam challenges developers to integrate “green activations” into their live games with existing audiences. These are gameplay experiences that aim to promote environmental awareness and empower players to take action.

In 2023, 40 games participated, with green activations centred on wildlife protection and ecosystem conservation. One example was the Turtle Division in Boom Beach, created by Supercell supporting the Sea Turtle Conservancy. Players completed missions to rescue turtles from a villainous scientist, while an influencer-led documentary helped link the game’s narrative to real-world conservation. That year, the participants of the Green Game Jam reached 85 million daily active users and raised over $700,000 for conservation causes.

These are impressive outcomes, but as a behavioural researcher, I wanted to dig deeper. Do these green activations actually influence behaviour? And what specific elements of gameplay are driving any change? While the Green Game Jam has demonstrated remarkable reach and fundraising success, rigorous evaluation of whether these activations actually change how people think and act has been limited. This year, I was fortunate to join a research team that aimed to start filling this gap. This research was a partnership between Playing for the Planet and its Green Game Jam member studios: Trailmix, Wooga, and Sybo. In this post, I'll hone in on our work with Trailmix.

In partnership with Trailmix, we evaluated a 21-day green activation in their mobile puzzle game Love & Pies for the Green Game Jam 2024. Love & Pies is a narrative-driven puzzle game with 9 million downloads, where players help single mother Amelia Green restore her family café. The activation featured a 21-day in-game event that invited players to engage with key environmental challenges related to food production and consumption, household waste and habitat restoration. Players completed milestones to unlock stories from climate activists, contribute to community goals, and access resources for joining local environmental groups, while collectively building a virtual community garden in Appleton. 

More than 33,000 players from around the world participated in the study, allowing us to examine how commercial games may influence real-world behaviour and the underlying factors that shape it. Using a pre-post survey design, we measured changes in participants' environmental knowledge, perceived capability to take action, beliefs about the effectiveness of their actions, and social connection around environmental issues. We assessed how changes in these measures related to players' in-game engagement data (i.e., how much they engaged with the challenges during the 21-day activation) by linking survey responses to objective play data.

At baseline, most players already felt moderately knowledgeable and capable of taking environmental action, and believed their actions could be effective when thinking about climate issues related to food consumption, waste, and restoration. However, gaps remained: about 1 in 5 reported low subjective knowledge or low perceived ability to act, especially regarding food-related behaviours. These findings suggest that even among engaged audiences, there’s room to build knowledge, motivation, and outcome efficacy.

After the activation, we found that players who engaged more with the content (i.e., completing more in-game milestones) showed small but meaningful increases in subjective knowledge and perceived capability, such as confidence in eating more vegetarian meals. This highlights the importance of repeated exposure and game mechanics that reinforce learning over time, rather than relying solely on one-off messaging.

We didn't find clear evidence of changes in self-reported behaviour. But for those familiar with behavioural research, that's not surprising. Habits such as diet and recycling are deeply ingrained and shaped by external constraints, including cost, time, and social norms. Games alone may not be enough to bridge the gap between intention and action, but they can influence the psychological foundations of behaviour, such as what people know, believe, and feel capable of doing.

That’s why thinking carefully about opportunity is so important. Some pro-environmental actions—like recycling or increasing plant-based meals—take place outside the game and are hard to support directly through gameplay. In those cases, green activations may be more effective when they aim to shape beliefs, build motivation, or increase knowledge. Other behaviours, however, can be prompted more immediately. Some 2024 Green Game Jam studios enabled players to donate to real-world causes or complete social media challenges, like sharing recipes of vegetarian meals. In Love & Pies, players were invited to submit stories about their own climate actions, encouraging reflection and public sharing, which can help shift social norms.

This is where collaboration between behavioural researchers and game developers could be especially fruitful. Developers know how to build engaging, emotionally resonant experiences. Researchers can help identify which psychological levers to target, provide theory-based intervention strategies, and evaluate outcomes more rigorously. This kind of evidence could help justify investment in green content and demonstrate the social value of games to stakeholders and policymakers.

Together, we can create greener games that not only entertain but also educate, empower, and inspire. Our study shows that evaluating interventions in live commercial games is not only possible, but it can be done at scale. However, our work also highlights challenges: getting commercial studios to allocate development time to green activations and research initiatives, designing valid, short-form measures for in-game use; reducing attrition; and improving study designs to support causal inference.

Still, it's an exciting space where behavioural research is needed. We often talk about meeting people where they are. Games are where 3.4 billion people spend their time these days, and this number is projected to keep growing. If we want to scale behaviour change, we need to engage people in the moments when they're open to learning, connecting, and reflecting. Commercial games offer a promising way to do just that—and with the right partnerships between researchers and developers, we can unlock their full potential for driving positive change.

Playing for the Planet is an Alliance that supports the video games industry to take action on the environment and is an initiative facilitated with the support of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and led by the games industry.

Blog authors: Dr Amy Rodger is a BR-UK Research Fellow based at the University of Edinburgh. Trevin York is Director at the game design studio Dire Lark, and he holds a master's degree in design for change from the University of Edinburgh. Dr Clayton Whittle is an Educational Content Developer at the US Green Building Council, with a PhD in Learning, Design, and Technology from Penn State University.

This project was funded by Playing for the Planet, with Amy Rodger’s time supported in part by the BR-UK grant.