The gaming industry reaches one in three people and is among the most influential businesses in the entire world. Although this is impressive in itself, what is remarkable is this industry’s capacity to influence young people’s behavior on a worldwide scale. To research this, UN team has been working with the gambling industry, in addition to using the International Olympic Committee and also the World Scouts Movement, to determine how young people can act to safeguard the environment.
Released in March, a new UN Environment study titled” Playing for the Planet” looks at how the gaming industry can influence the behavior of young people to act in support of their surroundings.
The analysis found that 87 per cent of those 50 leading gaming businesses demonstrate a deep commitment to making a change and are eager to support further action on this issue.
With a viewership of 3 billion hours per week, the gaming business has the uncanny ability to catch a number of people’s attention. For example in league of legends, Smurfers can get you an account for playing as a practice — as you can see, there are a lot of ways to advertise a game. Seeing that many young people today are concerned about the problem of climate change, and since one in five players are below the age of 21, UN Environment argues that there’s indeed a demand for environmental and nature-related content.
- Representatives of change: childhood has to be directly involved in message delivery as opposed to simply act as recipients because enabling young people to become agents of change is likely to lead to longer-lasting behaviour change.
- Fostering a connection with character: even though video games can function as a channel by which major environmental and societal messages may be conveyed, it’s imperative not to forget about the significance of being in character. “We need to have people on displays to the green and the green on displays,” said panelist Inger Andersen. There should be a means to measure whether, for example,”green nudges” in matches really impact real-world behavior.