"It's Just a Hoax": Climate Change Denial in Civilization VI's Reddit Communities

This paper examines climate change denial within online communities surrounding Civilization VI: Gathering Storm, focusing on Reddit discussions that respond to the game's modelling of anthropogenic CO₂ emissions and their consequences. The author argues that ecogames, while designed for environmental education, become contested sites where players construct and circulate counter-narratives, and that large informal community spaces remain underexplored in climate communication research. The study addresses how denialist framings emerge in these spaces outside formal educational or news media contexts.

The methodology draws on Reddit as the primary site, selecting three Civilization-related subreddits and a general Civ thread. Keyword queries produced a corpus of 32,612 comments posted between 2013 and 2026. The analysis combined semantic network analysis of terms co-occurring with "climate" and inductive thematic analysis to reconstruct dominant frames and narrative devices.

Results reveal a strongly polarised discourse organised around several thematic clusters. One prominent cluster frames climate change as a hoax or conspiracy tied to taxation and institutional control, while another contrasts anthropogenic accounts with natural-cycle explanations. A third cluster draws on distrust of climate scientists, invoking the 2009 "Climategate" episode and alleged data manipulation. A smaller group defends the game's representations as broadly consistent with IPCC assessments. The author concludes that these currents, which appear not to be systematically moderated, reframe climate science as a matter of belief and narrow the range of legitimate solutions, with online platforms functioning as infrastructures for diffusing alternative climate knowledge. The study acknowledges limits in its single-platform, four-subreddit scope.