Unique Study on RDR2 Shows How Video Games Can Make Us Care About Animals

The hugely successful Red Dead Redemption 2 (RDR2) video game puts you in a vast, open-world American West setting at the very end of the 19th century. Players can loot trains, shoot rival gang members, steal horses – and, it turns out, learn a lot about nature, too. Researchers surveyed 586 volunteers from 55 different countries, 444 of whom had played RDR2, and found that those with experience of the game were better at identifying real-life animals shown to them in photos. That's most likely down to the 200 or so real species of animals that are authentically rendered in RDR2 –...