Promoting Pro-environmental Beliefs and Behaviour: Choose-Your-Own Story Futuristic Climate Game

PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0317773 March 31, 2025 3 / 18 PLOS ONE Promoting Pro-environmental Beliefs and Behaviour individuals’ empathetic concern (H2a) and if empathy mediates the effect of the game on climate attitudes, policy preferences, and actions (H2b). Methods Intervention The intervention is a choose-your-own-adventure game that involves being the main char- acter of the story and navigating the consequences of a series of climate disasters — flooding, wildfires, drought, erosion and food shortages (see Fig 1 for a sketch). Each participant plays the game one time. While playing the online game, the participant is asked to make several important decisions within each climate crisis module. In designing five different climate risk scenarios (Fig 2), we drew on the UK government’s UK Climate Change Risk Assessment (Study 1, UK), and the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) Climate Change Impacts by State document (Study 2, US). We linked each risk scenario with relevant regions in the UK, and states in the US, also using government reports and recent news articles to determine which regions/states would be most realistically and saliently associated with each climate risk (see Table 1). The climate game was designed by the authors of this manuscript, building on the genre of choose-your-own-adventure books, for example, the 1970s famous books of The Cave of Time, by Edward Packard, and Journey under the sea, by R.A. Montgomery, among others (see also Simonovits et al. 2018 for a choose-your-own-adventure style intervention about Roma

Fig 1. A part of the climate choose-your-own-adventure narrative map (Fires Module). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0317773.g001 Fig 2. The list of scenario modules. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0317773.g002