Climate-Oriented Persuasive Edutainment (COPE) Model: Player Experience for Effective Climate Communication

Videogames can be persuasive assets in climate communication. However, there is insufficient knowledge on how to employ specific game design aspects to influence attitudes in the context of climate change. We developed a novel conceptual Climate-Oriented Persuasive Edutainment (C.O.P.E.) model to describe how game design features and elements wrapped in a climate-themed message frame can contribute to pro-environmental attitudes. We evaluated the design decisions in a loss-framed climate-themed videogame (Plasticity) as our case study. In a repeated measures interventional experiment (N=37), we examined the effects of Plasticity on players' explicit and implicit pro-environmental attitudes in the short and long term. We also assessed participants' experiences of the attitudinal capacity of three features of game design (mechanics, narrative, animation) and their relevant elements. We found that playing Plasticity influenced participants' threat perception and cognitive attitudes in the short term. The overall mechanics and narrative features were predictors of participants' climate threat perception, while the overall animation design predicted pro-environmental cognitive attitude. The storyline was the only element that predicted both threat perception and cognitive attitude. Also, the challenge design predicted threat perception and the exploration design predicted cognitive attitudes. Our work shows that a theme-pertinent, detail-oriented game design can be effective in enhancing climate communication.