What is it about?
Commercial video games increasingly aim to promote environmental activism. We present the first comprehensive overview of their use and impact for biodiversity conservation. This project is a collaborative effort between academic and industry sectors across the globe, and includes 380 papers, five languages, 450 unique games, empirical and non-empirical literature. To enhance the informative and practical value of our work, we illustrate research findings, trends, and gaps according to literature collated. Our findings are also shared using a freely accessible online interactive database.
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Why is it important?
Since tackling the rising threat of mass anthropogenic extinction demands global support, conservation outreach must reach large and diverse audiences. Thus far, academic research has primarily explored the role of ‘serious games’ for this purpose. However, there is a growing trend of conservation-related themes being addressed in ‘commercial video games’ – those with less emphasis on education, but more mainstream popularity. Clear evidence-based documentation on how commercial video games may engage players with species protection is provided, based on extensive mapping of the existing literature. We consider how such games can communicate conservation and influence players’ relationship with nature (e.g., by improving their understanding, attitudes, or behaviour). Overall, readers should have a stronger understanding of this practice, its potential implications for conservation, and how to advance knowledge on it. To make our project more informative for those involved with the design and deployment of relevant commercial video games (e.g., developers, publishers, advocates, researchers, and policymakers), we share our findings using a freely accessible database. Users can search for specific information according to multiple variables, such as game titles, devices, and research outcomes.
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: How commercial video games engage with biodiversity and conservation: a systematic map of literature, Games Research and Practice, May 2026, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3811918.
You can read the full text:
Resources
Games for Gaia: Leveraging Gaming Interventions for Biodiversity Conservation
Digital games offer a powerful and innovative platform for engaging global audiences with biodiversity and its conservation. As urbanisation and digital integration increase, games provide unique opportunities to simulate nature, educate players, and foster empathy towards environmental issues. While challenges remain, particularly in balancing entertainment with accurate representation of ecological complexities, the potential for games to inspire real-world conservation actions is real. As done by Sandbrook et al. (In press), considering the ethical and environmental implications of game design provides the theoretical groundwork for empirical examinations of their role. Our overview introduces such work, but a more comprehensive and systematic synthesis of literature is needed. In particular, reviews have thus far focused more on gamification and serious games. Yet, thorough documentation of current studies and gaps related to commercial games is necessary to strengthen any holistic understanding of these gameful modes of human-wildlife engagement. Only then can practitioners fully gauge the capabilities of these technologically-mediated experiences, and ensure they are responsibly leveraged to support sustainable environmental outcomes.
Interactive database and visualisations
An interactive database of collected literature to complement the manuscript. Users can view findings through charts, maps, and tables, with interactive elements for sorting and searching. As a few examples, literature can be identified based on game title(s), author name(s), year of publication, outcome(s) studied, paper type, or empirical papers’ methodology. Every table and figure on each page can be downloaded for use offline.
Contributors
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