Bruce, the director from Ecosystems Knowledge Network comes back for the conclusion of #Game4Nature:

"Games give us a sense of how vital nature is to everyone's daily life"
"We've seen the business case for gaming for nature; for games that are inspired by, and based on the natural world"
"People are better off if they can develop their connection to the natural world; games present pathways, especially for younger people"

Finishing the talk with the importance of getting local communities on board when planning or creating natural spaces around them #Game4Nature 🌳 💬 👍

Can video games help with eco-anxiety? #Game4Nature

Points talked about:
- Responsibility to make sure we are making nurturing environments in games (avoid sensationalism)
- Games can be a safe-space
- Games can provide healthy/alternative examples of nature
- Games can be an introduction point to accessible sustainability practices/activities
- Could we in the future have a system that detects how video game environments affect players?

I love the idea being discussed that games can shift traditional narratives of nature & how it is displayed #Game4Nature

The five panellists open a discussion with an audience question: Indie games showcase nature in a positive way, is there a space for AAA games to do the same?

My fave answer was about the potential of MMOs to create participation for a positive in-game cause (repair the world where destruction has happened, not destroy the villain) #Game4Nature

Thomas Fraser-Bacon (Allsee Technologies) is the last speaking of this session #Game4Nature

He works for a digital displays company who are looking into how can digital displays of nature help people's mental health? They are working with a university to research this topic & potential uses of digital displays.

They are working on an automated tagging system for nature paintings and images uploaded into their platform.

Dr Yangang Xing (Nottingham Trent University) comes next. He looks into how images of nature can be incorporated in buildings to improve mental health #Game4Nature

Dr Xing has worked on developing nature-based buildings, such as green roofs and walls, for urban sustainability. From there, he became interested in the benefits of nature to people.

Currently, he works in a group looking into intelligence buildings & sustainability. He is also interested in the biophilia hypothesis.

Benn Wiebe makes an appearance next at #Game4Nature

He works with companies helping them bridging story and advocacy. According to him, games and their digital ecosystems provide us with the opportunity to create connection and relationships between people (and nature).

Rob passes the baton to Rosie Baile (U. of Aberdeen) #Game4Nature

The beginning of Rosie's PhD was met with #COVID19 lockdowns, so her PhD became more about digital, looking into how people speak about nature, which benefits may people obtain from different experiences & versions of nature.

As a side project, she's also looking into Animal Crossing & developing a survey to look into the potential benefits people may be gaining from playing it.

Afternoon session time: Digital Nature and Mental Health #Game4Nature

Rob Gordon (RSWT and Screenrant Reviewer) is the first speaker. He says that we already know how important nature is for mental heath and that it works remotely (for example, by listening to recordings of bird song). So, why not video games?

At this point, panellists are bouncing from each other's ideas #Game4Nature
- Importance of storytelling & emotion
- Games can provide connection, awareness, calls to action that can make an impact in the real world
- Technology & games allow us to see "into the future" (what happens if I do X in game?)
- Videogames have power, let's use it to deal with the time-sensitive issues plaguing our world

We continue with a panel around digitalization and nature #Game4Nature

Some points raised by the speakers were:
- There's a gap in the market for innovative ways to engage, identify etc beings in nature
- Using innovative technology to make nature seem cool
- Several mentions to augmented reality as a neat way forward that should be explored
- A few talk downs towards educational traditional serious games

In Tom's experience, interpreting the site through the app allowed visitors to get a real sense of what used to be there, what the different archeologically remains were... #Game4Nature

In the study they didn't find a detraction of "nature" from usage of the app, visitors still engaged with the site (they were not "fixated with technology").

It is important to note that the study had a small sample size, but still, it is a very interesting study & results 🤓

The app help visitors navigate, provides information on how to get there, and there are CGI reconstructions on how the roman sites would have looked like back then.

The researchers studying this app were interested in the users experience: how did they interact with each other and the app #Game4Nature

We get a pre-recorded interview with Tom Smith, a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at Cardiff University next at #Game4Nature

Tom worked in a project that looked into an outdoor app which is meant to make a remote wilderness area more accessible (without introducing a lot of signage in the ground).

They found that all groups who played #RDR2 were able to better identify wildlife species, particularly those which were of use to the players #Game4Nature

The researchers would love to see more and better ecology in video games as well as more game techniques in ecological education. I completely agree 😄

Through the survey they were able to distinguish three main groups #Game4Nature
- completed #RDR2 game
- played naturalist*
- recent players

*Naturalist role is in the online part of the game which rewards players for finding animals & collecting samples from them (rather than hunting them) 💚

Red Dead Redepmtion 2 has over 200 realistic species in their game #Game4Nature

So, Ned asked himself: if educational games are unpopular, can popular games be educational?

And he designed a survey to test this. He got gamers to try and identify animals that appeared in the game (although not shooing the games in the game, shown in the slide for viewer's info).

Ned mentions the famous Science article that showed kids were better able to identify Pokémon than real wildlife (https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=21be3928e43c38a237766c23ac79393ba109b0a7) #Game4Nature

Ned Crowley is a programmer & biology lecturer, as well as a gamer #Game4Nature

In 2021 he published a study showing that Red Dead Redeption 2 helped people who had played it to ID animals (after a personal experience being able to identify birds he had learned about in the videogame).