Levelling Up for Nature: Pathways of Engagement with Green Messages in Games

Digital games have become potent platforms for environmental messaging, capable of influencing beliefs, attitudes, and behaviours. This paper explores how players engage with green content embedded within game environments, using mixedmethod data from the GREAT Project with more than 181,000 anonymised gameplay sessions. This research analysed cognitive, affective and behavioural responses to in-game environmental messaging and identified key pathways that lead to sustained pro-environmental actions using PCA and K-Means clustering analysis, by which varying types of user were identified from casual to deeply engaged players. The engagement questions were grouped into three categories: narrative frame, behavioural pledges, and social reflection. Our findings showed that 68% of the players participated in at least one green-themed pledge, which indicates a strong sensitivity to environmental content, informing a multilayered engagement model that supports both player experience and environmental literacy known as a 5- pathway green engagement model (5-PGEM), supporting the hypothesis that green messages, when embedded in games, can significantly shape eco-friendly actions.