Climate Change at Your Doorstep: An Experiment Using a Digital Game and Distance Framing

Action and concern about climate change keep increasing. Yet, the climate crisis has traditionally been perceived as far-away and abstract. It has been argued that forms of psychological distance such as geographic (it will not affect my local area) and social (it will not affect people like me) can lead to disengagement. Thus, interventions aiming to bring climate change closer are some of the most favored by experts. Among these, games and immersive technologies simulating distant and near locations have been proposed as ways to evoke emotional reactions and reduce psychological distance. Yet, our current knowledge can be strengthened and extended in several ways—existing interventions on media effects provide diverse results, controlled game-based interventions are rare, the use of real-world locations is also atypical, and the effects of combining a distance-centered and a well-being frame are underexplored. Here, we conducted a two-by-two factorial experiment (digital game vs. text, and distant vs. near frame) involving a final sample size of 126. The findings indicate that these media and frames similarly reduced psychological distance and increased issue involvement. Experienced immersion was also similar in all conditions. Based on our observations, we propose methodological and design ideas for future research.