Gamers Like It Green: The Significance of Vegetation in Online Gaming

Modern lifestyles have increased a separation between humans and nature while also integrating technology into daily life. The use of technology has not only supplanted people's traditional experiences with nature but begun to change them: Through videos and documentaries, we can discover windows opened onto wilderness, landscapes, places, and species we would not be able to reach and see otherwise. Even video games contribute to this phenomenon. Can gaming play a role in the relationship between humans and nature? The current study focused on how players relate to nature in the world's number-one online role-playing game, the World of Warcraft (WoW). We distributed an online questionnaire to 1,173 French-speaking gamers to assess their preferred landscapes in the virtual environment, their relations to nature in real life, and their motivations to play. The results indicate that players prefer virtual areas displaying a significant amount of green vegetation and specific open landscapes but that this preference is not related to their connectedness with nature nor to their motivation to play, which is mostly to escape from their daily life. We showed also that people that declared being motivated to play for nature-based reasons are those that declare being less connected with nature in real life. We discuss these results as a reflection of biophilia in a virtual context, that is, an attraction to virtual landscapes that are healthy and full of vegetation, when it has become difficult to reach such landscapes in real life.