Changing Climate Change Mental Models Through Game-Based Learning: A Controlled Experiment Involving Cognitive Mapping

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.