Stepping into the Wildeverse: Evaluating the impact of augmented reality mobile gaming on pro-conservation behaviours

Promoting pro-conservation behaviours has become a priority for conservation organisations worldwide. Yet, current engagement strategies still face a number of barriers to creating successful interventions at the scale needed to meet global sustainability challenges.

Online and mobile games enjoy immense worldwide popularity, tapping into an audience not normally reached through conventional conservation outreach channels. Despite this potential to be a new, high impact and scalable platform for promoting pro-environmental behaviours, the opportunities within digital games for conservation have thus far been little explored and organisations have called for robust impact evaluations for this medium. Therefore, we investigated the effectiveness of the augmented reality game Wildeverse, which seeks to generate support for ape conservation and encourage pro-environmental behaviours.

We conducted a randomised control trial to experimentally compare the impacts of this game against wat...