Reinforcing the Attitude-Behavior Relationship in Persuasive Game Design

Reinforcing the Attitude-Behavior Relationship in Persuasive Game Design: Four Design Recommendations for Persuasive Games for Societal Interventions

Erdbrink, A.E. (TU Delft Policy Analysis)
Kortmann, Rens (TU Delft Policy Analysis)
Verbraeck, A. (TU Delft Policy Analysis)

Liapis, Antonios (editor)
Yannakakis, Georgios N. (editor)
Gentile, Manuel (editor)
Ninaus, Manuel (editor)

2019

Persuasive games for societal interventions aim to shape, reinforce
or change players’ attitudes and behavior to help solving complex societal
issues. In earlier work, we explored how persuasive game mechanics may
contribute to the formation of attitudes in persuasive games. As a follow-up, this paper presents four design recommendations that could increase the chance that these attitudes will actually lead to the desired behavior shown by players after the game: viz., these attitudes require the right conditions to become a predictor of the desired, post-game behavior.
In order to arrive at these recommendations we looked at relevant work from the field of social psychology. Next we linked our insights to the context of persuasive game design. This yielded four conceptual design recommendations for maximizing the likelihood for an attitude influenced by a persuasive game to result in the desired behavior in the real world;
1. aligning the degree of specification of a game’s message and the desired behavior
2. emphasizing the function of the attitude to be influenced
3. enabling players to reflect on their internal states
4. emphasizing personal relevance of an attitude to a behavioral choice
So far, these recommendations are still theoretical in nature. We therefore discuss how future work should empirically examine these, including their implications for the effective use of persuasive game mechanics.

Persuasive games Societal interventions Persuasive game design Attitude-behavior relationship
Persuasive game design
Attitude-behavior relationship
Societal interventions
Persuasive games

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:89e4269d-a2dc-46a7-ba39-65cec79f4645

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34350-7_9

Springer, Cham

2020-05-01

9783030343491

Games and Learning Alliance- 8th International Conference, GALA 2019, Proceedings: 8th International Conference, GALA 2019, Athens, Greece, November 27–29, 2019, Proceedings

Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), 0302-9743, 11899 LNCS

Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.

Institutional Repository

conference paper

© 2019 A.E. Erdbrink, Rens Kortmann, A. Verbraeck