Memorability of Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Virtual Reality: An Evaluation of Enactment and Quiz-Based Gamification

Immersive experiences are increasingly used to communicate environmental impacts. Such experiences could be useful in raising engagement and knowledge of the general public regarding greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. However, it is not clear if increasing the degree of gamification or enacted interactions in such immersive experiences could increase the memorability of GHG emissions data. To answer this question, we designed a virtual reality experience allowing people to explore GHG emissions of daily actions with various degrees of enacted and gamified interactions. We conducted a controlled and pre-registered study with 63 participants to understand how quiz-based gamification and enactment could influence GHG emissions memorability, intrinsic motivation and flow. We found evidence for our immersive design to increase general public knowledge about GHG emissions, whatever the condition. However, we found no strong evidence for an effect of enactment on GHG emissions memorability, while we found slight evidence for a small positive effect of quiz-based gamification. Moreover, we showed a positive effect of enactment on flow and intrinsic motivation. This study contributes to the understanding of how immersive visualizations can be optimized for climate education, highlighting the nuanced roles of gamification and enactment in shaping user engagement and knowledge gains. Supplementary material available at https://osf.io/48pnr.