Modern video games often provide players with fictional worlds that the players (characters) can explore. While some game worlds include utterly alien (Star Wars: The Old Republic, Horizon Zero Dawn) or dense urban landscapes (Grand Theft Auto 5, Spiderman), many offer a world that has large stretches of “natural environment” as could be found on Earth (The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, Red Dead Redemption). However, many of these natural environments contain elements that are, from a geoscientific point of view, unrealistic. This could be due either to the restraints of having to provide an engaging video game or to the game designers wanting to present the players with a fantastic, epic setting for their video game. The most strikingly unrealistic aspect of many video games is that different climate zones are often represented on a relatively small area. For example, the entire world of Red Dead Redemption 2, although considered massive for a game, only covers 75 km2 (Reddit, 2018), yet includes deserts, prairies, grassy planes, forests, and mountain ranges. Similarly, the world of Hyrule in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was designed to be “about as big as Kyoto” (Webster, 2017), yet it includes, again, sweltering sand deserts, mountain ranges, swamps, and a freezing arctic tundra.

Video games have a great potential for tangential learning, i.e. learning things about the real world as a tangential benefit while primarily enjoying the experience (Portnow, 2012; Mozelius et al., 2017). The tangential learning opportunities of video games have been studied elsewhere (see e.g. Breuer and Bente, 2010; Mozelius et al., 2017); however, what has not yet been fully addressed is the extent to which this tangential learning could lead to misinformation if the game world was presented in a manner that was incongruent with reality. As such, we wondered whether presenting unrealistic geo-features in a video game might lead to erroneous learning; i.e. might gamers pick up flawed knowledge of geo-features in our real world because they are presented as realistic within the game world? To test this hypothesis, we conducted a survey in which people were presented with images from the real world and screenshots from a video game before being asked to rate how realistic they thought the depicted landscape was. To make sure that the different images were not recognizable as “from a video game” versus “from the real world” (e.g. due to rendering and pixelation), while still depicting the landscapes we wanted to study, we used an automated artistic “van Gogh” filter available at LunaPic.com (LunaPic, 2015). This filter hides the detailed nature of the image by replacing pixels with brush strokes, but retains the overall shape of geological features depicted in the image.

Video games are often reported in the popular press as having supposed negative consequences, such as those associated with addiction, violence, and isolation (Ferguson, 2007). However, several studies (dating back to the 1980s) have also shown that there are many positive benefits to be gained from playing video games, such as improving the hand-to-eye coordination, self-esteem, and even social interactions of the players (see e.g. Griffiths, 2002; Granic et al., 2014; Wang et al., 2018). The educational benefits of playing video games have also been well studied and documented (Squire, 2002, 2003; Gee, 2003; Mayer, 2019), and the potential for video games to contribute towards scientific education is highlighted in the following quote from Gee (2003, p. 20), who states that

Designers face and largely solve an intriguing educational dilemma, one also faced by schools and workplaces: how to get people, often young people, to learn and master something that is long and challenging – and enjoy it, to boot.

As noted by Mayo (2009), video games have tremendous mass appeal, reaching audiences in the hundreds of thousands to millions, and so video games would seem to be an ideal medium through which to communicate geoscientific topics, especially in informal learning environments.

As noted by Dudo et al. (2014), video games now represent one of the primary platforms through which the general public, and in particular children and adolescents, observe and interact with scientists, and given their global reach and popularity they are fast becoming a key science touch point for non-scientists. As well as being an important tool in engaging non-traditional audiences (Newman et al., 2012), video games offer the opportunity to spark meaningful and organic engagement around a particular topic (Curtis, 2014). However, if video games convey information that is incorrect or misleading, then it might be that this engagement serves to detract from, rather than contribute towards, the development of meaningful scientific discourse by members of the general public (Squire, 2003). In understanding and constructing meaning from video games, individuals process the images and elements of design (Rodríguez Estrada and Davis, 2015), and it is the purpose of this study to better understand how this processing enables non-geoscientific audiences to differentiate between realistic and unrealistic geo-features.

In the methods section below we explain the setup of our survey and the statistical methods used to analyse the results. In the results section we present our findings and, in the conclusions, we contextualize these findings and discuss further opportunities for research. Finally, Appendix A contains a post hoc analysis of the survey data, to look for further interesting patterns. The entire survey is provided in the Supplement.