If I tell you that spending more time on phones or gaming consoles could actually help the environment, you would probably call me crazy. For years, people have been told to go outside and reconnect with other humans and nature. And yet, I can assure you some of the most effective environmental movements of the past decade have started on screens, not in forests.
The Unexpected Match of Gaming and Sustainability
Back in 2016, when Alibaba launched Ant Forest (https://www.antgroup.com/en/news-media/press-releases/1629882059000), nobody could have imagined that it would become one of the largest reforestation programs. The concept was pretty simple and straightforward: users would earn “green energy” points by doing low-carbon activities like walking instead of driving, or paying their bills online. By collecting enough points a virtual tree would grow. Now, when the tree would mature enough in the game, the corresponding people in charge from Alibaba would plant a real tree somewhere in China.
The results? In just five years, over 600 million users had contributed to planting more than 326 million actual trees across approximately 112.000 hectares (Ant Group, 2021 https://www.antgroup.com/en/news-media/press-releases/1629882059000; UNFCCC https://unfccc.int/). Yes, you read that right, a mobile app game mechanism led to hundreds of millions of trees being put into the ground!
Now, the most interesting thing here is the question this fact raises: why does turning environmental action into a game makes people so much more likely to do it?
Understanding Why It Works
The psychology behind this isn’t something mysterious or unknown. On the contrary, you could say it’s rather simple, yet very powerful. As we already know, humans are wired to respond to immediate feedback, visible progress, and social recognition, but the main problem with environmental actions is that their impact is slow and most often indirect. They do not offer any actually engaging elements and people quickly lose their motivation. You may recycle your trash or bring a reusable bag to the grocery store, but at the end of the day nothing happens; or at least that’s what you experience. There’s no visible glacier saved; no notification that a carbon footprint dropped by 0.002%.
Well, through games this equation changes entirely, bringing new possibilities on the table.
You see, when users complete a sustainability challenge in an app like JouleBug (https://joulebug.com/), they get rewarded with points, or when they successfully maintain an eco-friendly behavior streak, the dopamine hormone keeps their motivation levels high. Not to mention the impact of the community leaderboards, where a previously individualized experience suddenly takes wide social dimensions.
Psychologists call this feedback loop between autonomy (choosing to participate), competence (seeing improvement), and relatedness (being part of a community) the foundations of intrinsic motivation. This “Self-Determination Theory” framework, shows that people who engage in activities driven by intrinsic motivation are more likely to sustain long-term habits compared to those motivated by separate external rewards alone (Deci & Ryan, 2000 https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327965PLI1104_01). And games naturally include all these three elements.
Beyond Points and Badges: Games That Actually Teach
But gamification can be much more than just earning stars for completing good behavior challenges. The most meaningful results happen when games are designed to fundamentally change how players think about real-life environmental matters.
Eco (https://play.eco/) for example, a game developed by Strange Loop Games, is a multiplayer survival game where players collaboratively build a civilization from scratch. Though, the twist here is that every action players do has ecological consequences. Cutting down too many trees collapses the forest ecosystem while polluting waterways affects the fish populations. And the key thing is that the game doesn’t warn players about these connections through any theoretical mechanism. It just lets them discover these consequences through painful experience.
Furthermore, researchers who studied Eco found something remarkable: most players who spent a serious amount of time playing this game developed a skill called “environmental systems thinking”. In other words, they began understanding the principle of cause and effect in ecological systems, and later this understanding impacted how they viewed real-world environmental issues ([Fjællingsdal & Klöckner, 2019 https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02846).
On the other hand, Terra Nil (https://www.terranil.com/) by Free Lives took a different approach, but with equally interesting and impactful results. Instead of the traditional city-builder concept where players extract resources and expand their constructions endlessly, they restore a barren wasteland into a thriving ecosystem. Now, the game starts with dead earth and ends with players carefully removing all traces of their intervention, leaving only nature behind. It is a profound gaming experience focused more on restoration rather than exploitation, and after hours of testing players mention that it truly changed the way they think about land use and development.
Another worth-mentioning example is the game Alba: A Wildlife Adventure (https://www.albawildlife.com/) developed and published by Ustwo Games, which places the player in the role of a young conservationist who must rally a community to protect local wildlife. According to the review of PC Gamer (https://www.pcgamer.com/how-alba-a-wildlife-adventures-environmental-message-is-accomplishing-change-in-the-real-world/), the game has accomplished real change with its environmental message, inspiring many players to take conservation action in their own local communities (Taylor, 2021 https://www.pcgamer.com/how-alba-a-wildlife-adventures-environmental-message-is-accomplishing-change-in-the-real-world/).
From Virtual Actions to Actual Trees
One of the most important things that separates an effective environmental game from a mere entertainment experience is the strong bridge they build to real-world impact.
The “Play-to-Plant” model found in apps like EverForest (https://everforest.gg/) and Tree Planet 2 (https://treepla.net/) directly connects in-game progress to real tree planting. Simple as that, each successfully grown virtual tree results in the planting of a physical one, always with the help of a corresponding partner organization. Then players can literally see their action’s outcome through satellite images of forests they helped create.
Litterati (https://www.litterati.org/) on the other hand took crowdsourcing in a different yet interesting direction. The users’ goal is to photograph and geo-tag various pieces of litter they find, in order to build a global database that will help governments and NGOs understand pollution patterns and arrange cleanup policies. According to statistics, over 250.000 users across more than 185 countries have documented millions of litter items (Litterati Inc., 2022 https://www.litterati.org/stories/why-are-people-collecting-litter-data). The gamification elements (rewards systems, community challenges, impact tracking, leaderboards, etc.) keep people engaged, but the main point is that the results deliver valuable environmental data.
Last but not least, the game Crab God (https://www.chaostheorygames.com/) found yet another model: it encourages players to vote on which conservation causes should receive a portion of the game’s actual revenue. Through this simple mechanism, the gameplay becomes directly connected to funding real conservation work and raising sustainability awareness.
The Challenge of Keeping It Real
Of course, creating the perfect environmental game is not the easiest thing to do. One of the most difficult designing challenges in these games is that they risk two extremes: being too educational (and dull) or too entertaining (and meaningless). By pushing the environmental message too hard players will disengage quickly, while making the game too fun without substance won’t stand a chance of changing anyone’s behavior. The challenge here is to merge both entertainment with education elements while keeping the ideal balance in every situation.
The games that handle these issues effectively are usually the ones that have figured out how to embed learning into gameplay mechanisms smoothly rather than just managing and presenting knowledge as separate content. Seeing your civilization collapsing as a consequence of your non-environmental choices, is what actually teaches you that sustainability shouldn’t be ignored. And that earned lesson has then more chances to be transferred from your gaming experience to your real life habits.
Following up with this big question of whether these digital behaviors actually translate to real-world habits or not, the early research that has been made is rather encouraging. Studies show that gamified sustainability interventions can increase eco-friendly behavior by up to 40% when presented with the proper engagement mechanisms (Hamari et al., 2016 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2015.07.045). Some other interesting data from interviews with Ant Forest users show that participating in the app significantly increased their awareness of eco-friendly behaviors and eventually led to more environmentally conscious choices in their everyday life (Chen & Cai, 2019 https://doi.org/10.3390/j2040030).
What Comes Next
Based on the projections, the gamification market is going to grow from $22.2 billion in 2024 to over $102.5 billion by 2033 (IMARC Group, 2024 https://www.imarcgroup.com/gamification-market) with the environmental applications being one of its most promising representatives. The UN’s “Playing for the Planet” alliance (https://playing4theplanet.org/) has brought major gaming companies together under specific sustainability commitments, in order to raise awareness and, most importantly, to ensure the reduction of the industry’s own carbon footprint. Starting from 2021, 60% of its member companies committed to achieve net-zero or carbon-negative status by 2030 (UNRIC, 2022 Unric).
The most impressive aspect noticed by the market analysts is how this trend redefines the relationship between technology and environmentalism. For many years, we’ve been taught to treat these forces -digital versus natural- like they are the exact opposite of one another. But with all these recent data and facts, we can clearly see that the most effective environmental games don’t have to force people to choose between the two. They just have to accept these familiar situations as they are, and use both technology and environmentalism as tools to build new habits and new understanding from scratch.
And on second thought, maybe that’s the profound insight here. Environmental activism has often been framed as a restriction or a sacrifice that someone has to make: you have to give up your car, or you should use and consume less. And there’s nothing more discouraging than that. But games found a way to reverse this concept. They make sustainability feel like achievement, progress, or a unified community’s matter. And to be honest, judging by the millions of trees now growing because someone wanted to level up their virtual garden, that reversing seems to be exactly what the environmental movement needs.
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References
Ant Group. (2021, August 25). *Ant Group launches “Ant Forest” Global Challenge to inspire climate-action heroes*. https://www.antgroup.com/en/news-media/press-releases/1629882059000
Chen, Y., & Cai, D. (2019). Ant Forest through the haze: A case study of gamified participatory pro-environmental communication in China. *J*, 2(4), 467–479. https://doi.org/10.3390/j2040030
Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2000). The “what” and “why” of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior. *Psychological Inquiry*, 11(4), 227–268. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327965PLI1104_01
Fjællingsdal, K. S., & Klöckner, C. A. (2019). Gaming green: The educational potential of Eco—A digital simulated ecosystem. *Frontiers in Psychology*, 10, 2846. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02846
Hamari, J., Shernoff, D. J., Coller, B., Asbell-Clarke, J., & Edwards, T. (2016). Challenging games help students learn: An empirical study on engagement, flow, and immersion in game-based learning. *Computers in Human Behavior*, 54, 170–179. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2015.07.045
IMARC Group. (2024). *Gamification market size, share, trends and forecast by component, deployment mode, enterprise size, industry vertical, and region, 2025-2033*. https://www.imarcgroup.com/gamification-market
Litterati Inc. (2022, June 22). *Why are people collecting litter data?* https://www.litterati.org/stories/why-are-people-collecting-litter-data
Taylor, M. (2021, May 24). How Alba: A Wildlife Adventure’s environmental message is accomplishing change in the real world. *PC Gamer*. https://www.pcgamer.com/how-alba-a-wildlife-adventures-environmental-message-is-accomplishing-change-in-the-real-world/
United Nations Regional Information Centre. (2022). *Playing for the Planet Alliance progress report*. https://unric.org/