Gaming for Ecological Activism: A Multidimensional Model for Networks Articulated Through Video Games

Abstract

In the past 2 decades, reflections on video games’ ideological and political aspects—and their overarching media ecosystems—have grown. Despite this, few contributions focus on environmental issues, mainly empirically-oriented studies or ecocritical contributions vis-à-vis shared models and systematizations. Starting from the “To The Last Tree Standing” campaign carried out in 2017 for Greenpeace Poland to stop the deforestation of the Białowieża forest, this research sets out to elaborate an analytical model to outline the constitutive dimensions to be taken into account in analyses of how video games and environmental activism can intersect in a specific intentional communicative instance. The results, which relied on semi-structured interviews with executives and designers ( n = 3) and inductive thematic analysis and sentiment analysis of the YouTube comments, delineate three initial categories ( controversy, campaign network, and game ecosystem). This evidence highlights new development trajectories for studying the intersection between the gaming world and ecological activism.