Thought-Provoking and Interactive Visual Outreach: a non-traditional approach to science communication through gaming

Abstract

Traditional scientific writing and education can be hard to engage with and inaccessible. This project evaluates whether a video game about determining the age of hydrothermal vents is more engaging and informative as an outreach tool than a paper about the same subject. This was done by conducting a literature review and writing a review paper, making a game using the Python-based visual novel package Ren’Py, and providing subjects with either the game or the paper, along with an accompanying survey. The results of statistics on these survey results showed that the paper and game performed similarly, except for when subjects were asked which they were more likely to recommend to others. The game’s recommendation P-value was a statistically significant 0.044 compared to α=0.05. Generally, the results of this study were promising, though the data gathered was not sufficient to conclude if video games were a more informative and engaging outreach tool.