Paper short abstract:

Disseminating environmental scientific knowledge requires innovative approaches to boost public interest. This research draws upon two campaigns employing Minecraft to introduce a multi-dimensional analytical model to examine the socio-technical assemblage of such communicative instances.

Paper long abstract:

The dissemination of scientific knowledge in the environmental domain needs innovative approaches to enhance public interest and consensus concerning sustainability agendas. In particular, environmental engineering knowledge is among the most challenging fields to communicate effectively. In this regard, simulation has long been recognized as a suitable strategy to address this difficulty and recently scholars have started to investigate how online 3D environments may serve as a prominent platform for articulating communicative instances directed towards specific targets.

This study investigates two top-down campaigns employing the open-world video game Minecraft to recreate tridimensional physical ecological environments as a means of mediating environmental knowledge. The first is a 2021 institutional campaign in Venice, Italy, where developers built an interactive map of the Venetian lagoon to promote sustainable development through a series of green practices. The second case is a 2020 corporate campaign that engages elementary school students in constructing a local power plant in Minecraft to simulate water usage and conceptualize an environmentally sustainable city.

The research, grounded in semi-structured interviews with campaign and software developers (n=6), introduces a multidimensional analytical model that explores how knowledge emerges and takes shape from the intersections among ecological issues, the network of actors and stakeholders involved in communication, and the video game ecosystem (which includes the video game assets and affordances as well as the articulation of its community). The analysis exposes trade-offs in disseminating environmental knowledge through the video game ecosystem and elucidates the chain of interdependencies forming the socio-technical assemblage sustaining such communicative instances.