Play to win over: Effects of persuasive games.

Abstract

Persuasive games are a subset of serious games that are getting increased attention from the gaming industry as well as researchers. Although their title implies they can be intuitively defined as having the primary intention of changing or reinforcing players' attitudes on certain topics, only a handful of studies have provided evidence that these games actually influence attitudes. After presenting a summary of previous studies' results, the current article expands on this evidence by reporting on a controlled online experiment that compared a currently playable persuasive game (My Cotton Picking Life) to a mobilizing YouTube clip covering the same topic. The study included a pre-and post-test and two media conditions. 237 individuals (mean age of 23) from an international population participated in this study. Since the persuasive game and comparable movie clip were concerned with forced labor in Uzbekistani cotton fields, attitude scales on empowerment, the workload of cotton picking, and denial of the issue, were composed for this study and subsequently validated. Results showed a greater increase on workload attitudes for individuals who played the game than for those who watched the clip. Enjoyment of the game as well as awareness of the game's intent also increased the attitude change from pre-to post-test. The paper offers insight into how persuasive games can be further validated with different methods, and concludes that there is mounting evidence for the viability of games as a medium for persuasive communication.

Investigating the Effects of a Persuasive Digital Game on Immersion, Identification, and Willingness to Help

“…Although strong effects of persuasive games have been found in some studies (Kampf & Cuhadar, 2014;Peng et al, 2010;Ruggiero, 2015), weaker effects have been found in other studies (Barthel, 2013;Gutierrez et al, 2014;Jacobs, 2016;Soekarjo & Van Oostendorp, 2015). Ultimately, however, there are too few empirical studies to derive conclusions on the genre as a whole.…”

“…In the academic literature, player-game interactions are described with multiple concepts that are sometimes similar and almost always related (Caroux et al, 2015;Wirth et al, 2007). Examples are engagement (Boyle, Connolly, Hainey, & Boyle, 2012), enjoyment (Jacobs, 2016), presence (Banos et al, 2004), and flow (Schmierbach, Chung, Wu, & Kim, 2014). Resolving this debate was not the aim of the present research, however.…”

“…To our knowledge, however, this has not been investigated. Jacobs (2016) experimentally compared a persuasive game with a video clip but did not include immersion as an outcome measure. Peng et al (2010) compared a persuasive game with a video of recorded gameplay but also did not include immersion as an outcome measure.…”

“…Unfortunately, this observation is still true 8 years after it was made: Research on the effectiveness of persuasive games aimed at social impact is still relatively scarce (Jacobs, 2016;Ruggiero, 2015). Although there is a burgeoning literature on digital games that aims to promote a healthy lifestyle (DeSmet et al, 2014;Van 't Riet, Crutzen, & Lu, 2014) and digital games that are used in education and training contexts (Wouters, van Nimwegen, van Oostendorp, & Van der Spek, 2013), research on the effectiveness of persuasive games aimed at social impact is relatively scarce (Jacobs, 2016;Ruggiero, 2015). The current article aims to contribute to a stronger empirical foundation by studying the effectiveness of Against All Odds, a persuasive game that has been designed to increase empathy for refugees.…”

The influence of social cues in persuasive social robots on psychological reactance and compliance

“…We selected a game as a medium to deliver the experimental task since games are engaging and can keep the players' concentration high and prevent boredom during the 25 min of the experimental session (Jacobs, 2016;Lawson & Semwal, 2016). The task for this study is based on an online game called 'Smoothie Maker: Creation Station'.…”