Video Games for Environmental Communication: Raising Awareness through Sandbox Games and Streamers

Video games have come to play a significant role in the media habits of various generational\r\ncohorts, but particularly of the younger ones. Because of this, serious games have emerged in\r\nthe past two decades as a viable way to sensitize to sociopolitical issues and today they’re employed\r\nalso for sensitizing about environmental issues. This research examines the “To The Last\r\nTree Standing” (“Ostatnie drzewo”) campaign carried out in 2017 by advertising agency Ogilvy\r\nPoland for Greenpeace to stop the deforestation of the Białowieża forest. To generate awareness\r\namong younger segments of the audience, the campaign leveraged the popularity of the sandbox\r\nvideo game Minecraft, within which a 1:1 digital copy of the forest was developed, and of famous\r\nPolish videogame “streamers” (i.e. people broadcasting their gameplay sessions). Methodologically,\r\nthe research relied on interviews to executives and designers (n=4), as well as content analysis\r\nof the campaign and related discourses in Polish media (n=19). The findings suggest that a)\r\nsandbox games can generate innovative storytelling practices overcoming the political polarization\r\nof environmental communication; b) sandbox games as Minecraft, thanks to the high degree\r\nof manipulation of its worlds and the freedom of creation it allows, represent a salient framework\r\nfor the meaning-making of ecological facts; c) streamers represent an “educational leverage” for\r\nthe development of ecological attitudes. This evidence highlights new development trajectories\r\nfor the study of environmental communication.