Geeks versus climate change: understanding American video gamers’ engagement with global warming

As climate change impacts increase, communicators must engage as many audiences as possible in climate action. One potentially underrated audience is video gamers. Two-thirds of Americans play video games, and video games are a potentially effective climate change communication tool. However, little research has examined whether video gamers have unique value as a target audience for climate communication, and if they do, what might be effective ways to reach them. To address this need, we use two surveys including self-identified video game players in the United States to measure their current engagement with climate change, including through video gaming. In Study 1, a nationally representative survey in the United States (N = 1,006), we found that being a video gamer was slightly positively associated with intentions to take collective action on global warming. In Study 2, restricted to gamers in the United States (N = 2,034), we found that having more friends and family who played video games, and/or being exposed to global warming content in gaming, were also positively associated with collective action intentions. These findings were consistent even after controlling for potential confounding variables such as age, political party, and global warming attitudes. Results suggest that video gamers are a worthwhile potential audience for future climate change communication, combatting the stereotype of video gamers as disengaged or antisocial, at least in the context of climate change. Our study also identifies several potential avenues for future communication with video gamers, particularly outreach to and engagement with gaming communities.