Video games as a tool for ecological learning: the case of Animal Crossing

Amidst lockdown policies in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, many used video games as a method to maintain a connection with others while ensuring social distancing. A new edition of the Animal Crossing series of games had been released in March 2020 and beat sales and downloads records. The game focuses on living in a natural environment, building a house and a village, as well as capturing, exhibiting, and selling species to progress. Here we examine whether players gain species identification skills and whether it is transferred to real-life models. We used the results from a survey conducted from the end of March to early April 2020 on 200 people (72 players and 128 nonplayers of Animal Crossing). Participants were first asked to rank their personal interest in nature and then to identify species from photos. The photos displayed both organisms present in the game and organisms that were not. We expected players to obtain a slightly higher score than nonplayers for questions related to the species present in the game and a similar score in both groups for questions related to species not present in the game. Multivariate analyses (multiple linear regression and principal components analysis [PCA]) showed that players were better than nonplayers at identifying real-life species that were present in the game. The role of the species in the game design impacts the ability to identify the species in real life, such as plants having mainly a role of ornamentation. Additionally, this study suggests that survey participants could correctly assess their naturalistic knowledge in general. This article shows that video games can help enhance ecological learning, improve organisms identification, and might be used as a tool for education in conservation biology.

Role of e-commerce and resource utilization for sustainable business development: goal of economic recovery after Covid-19

This study seeks to granularly document the fundamental aspects of the pandemic and its effect on the global scale and environmental steadiness. Structural equation modeling (SEM) is therefore utilized to analyze these constructs. The study results show that the pathway coefficient for the parameters, such as health awareness, naturalism, mediation, personal development, sustainability, sociability, empathy, and cooperation, illustrates that the parameters directly impact pandemic control and management. At the same time, the lockdown and social distance rules attain dire consequences on the “conventional” retail property sector. It might speed up the evolution procedure of different conduits retail plus the channel coupling performance of physical stores and, hence, cause changes in urban areas–retail sector. The pandemic isn’t necessarily leading to the shutdown of retail stores. Nonetheless, it might have a meaningful effect on the retail estate enterprise business. The results show a requirement for the rapid physical shop repositioning performance of different channels firms. The study presents a meaningful understanding and demonstrates many consequences for the retailers, Landlords, and equally policy crafting components tackling urban regeneration plus local economic advancement within the post-covid phase.

Sustainable impact of COVID-19 on education projects: aspects of naturalism.

History records show that pandemics and threats have always given new directions to the thinking, working, and learning styles. This article attempts to thoroughly document the positive core of coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) and its impact on global social psychology, ecological stability, and development. Structural equation modeling (SEM) is used to test the hypotheses and comprehend the objectives of the study. The findings of the study reveals that the path coefficients for the variables health consciousness, naturalism, financial impact and self-development, sustainability, compassion, gregariousness, sympathy, and cooperation demonstrate that the factors have a positive and significant effect on COVID-19 prevention. Moreover, the content analysis was conducted on recently published reports, blog content, newspapers, and social media. The pieces of evidence from history have been cited to justify the perspective. Furthermore, to appraise the opinions of professionals of different walks of life, an online survey was conducted, and results were discussed with expert medical professionals. Outcomes establish that the pandemics give birth to creativity, instigate innovations, prompt inventions, establish human ties, and foster altruistic elements of compassion and emotionalism.