Last year I wrote a post about the effectiveness of making a video game with the intent of inducing EA ideas naturally through gameplay. The game got released on Steam and received positive impressions, so I wanted to follow up with the results.
Although I was originally quite optimistic about using games (and other forms of art) for EA, my current thinking has changed. First of all, the original estimates had various flaws:
1) Combining confidence intervals also increases the uncertainty of the variable. Thus none of the calculations were actually conclusive.
2) I underestimated the amount of effort/luck needed for marketing, and overestimated the expected number of players.
3) Although the game received praise for its depth, in 10 follow-up interviews none of the reviewers reported having changed their behavior or thinking as a result of playing it.
Since only around a thousand players experienced the main part of the game, having spent a whole year on it seems inefficient. Additional effort also seems unlikely to greatly improve the cost-effectiveness, even though the playerbase still has room to expand.
Given this I'm now less confident about whether game development can be reasonably pursued from an EA perspective. The effects don't seem tractable, it's very difficult to know what will be meaningful during development, there's loads of work that's not relevant to the intended message, and any larger influence requires a disproportionately lucky hit in the market.
As far as I know, it also seems that the people behind https://www.effectivegivingquest.org/ and https://www.twinearth.com/ have experienced similar problems, more or less abandoning their EA+gaming projects. (Correction in the comments: EGQ closed for unrelated reasons.)
That being said, I do still think the medium has lots of unexplored potential, it just seems very difficult for game developers to utilize. My guess is that people in lead design, director, and producer roles at large studios seem much more likely to be able to induce relevant insights for (a large number of) players. In comparison, spending lots of time and money for an indie game just to temporarily influence a handful of players doesn't seem like a very effective endeavor. Writing a piece of text would be a much leaner method of delivering a message.
Personally, I made the decision to focus more on AI alignment moving forward. It seems more immediate, more important, more tractable, has much higher marginal impact, and could also benefit from shifts in cultural norms. I'd like to recommend looking into it if you're at all interested.
I think there definitely have been games that have changed peoples' moral preferences, or at least provoked thoughts/ideas that have led to shifts in priorities. Usually such a game wouldn't cause a person to change their views entirely, but I've seen many cases where a good game would cause a person to update specific moral values (similar to a good movie or book). I'm not aware of any analysis of the cognitive mechanisms, though.
Just as a personal anecdote, I became more interested/concerned about global welfare after playing games like Cave Story, Final Fantasy 7, and Metal Gear Solid (which have diverse portrayal of strife/conflict). Games like Passage, Mother 3, and Undertale (which are about mortality, family, and friends) caused me to value my interpersonal and family connections much more highly. Yet others made animal welfare more of a concern for me.
In many of the cases, it wasn't necessarily the content of the game that directly caused an update, but rather the thought process that it provoked, leading to a new conclusion of some kind. This is what I mean by games "inducing" ideas, e.g. by Mineralis having content that "induces EA concepts naturally through gameplay". Many such occurrences are almost certainly intentional; it could be said to be a way designers add "subtext" into gameplay.
Granted, a lot of the EA-relevant interest provoked by games wasn't very concrete until I discovered EA. But I think various experiences in games helped "plant the seeds" that led my moral compass to work the way it does today. I'm guessing that people who have experienced many things through movies would say the same about them.