Currently, gaming is the world's favorite form of entertainment. Various studies have shown how games impact players' perceptions and behaviors, prompting opportunities for purposes beyond entertainment. This study uses Animal Crossing: New Horizons (ACNH), a real-time life-simulation game, as a unique case study of how video games can affect humans' environmental perceptions. A dataset of 584 observations from a survey of ACNH players and the Hamiltonian MCMC technique has enabled us to explore the relationship between in-game behaviors and perceptions. The findings indicate a probabilistic trend towards exploiting the in-game environment despite players' perceptions, suggesting that the simplification of commercial game design may overlook opportunities to engage players in pro-environmental activities.
@article{arxiv.2006.09706,
title = {On the environment-destructive probabilistic trends: a perceptual and behavioral study on video game players},
author = {Quan-Hoang Vuong and Manh-Toan Ho and Minh-Hoang Nguyen and Thanh-Hang Pham and Hoang-Anh Ho and Thu-Trang Vuong and Viet-Phuong La},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2006.09706},
year = {2020}
}