The Design of a Persuasive Game to Motivate People with Asthma in Adherence to Their Maintenance Medication

Objective: This study aimed to design a persuasive game, using objective adherence data, to motivate people with asthma to adhere to their medication regimen. Methods: A participatory user-centered design approach was employed, involving end-users and other stakeholders throughout the study. The approach consisted of four phases. Semi...

Games in Times of a Pandemic: Structured Overview of COVID-19 Serious Games

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic introduced an urgent need for effective strategies to disseminate crucial knowledge and improve people’s subjective well-being. Complementing more conventional approaches to knowledge dissemination, game-based interventions were developed to create awareness and educate people about the pandemic, hoping to...

The Design and Application of Game Rewards in Youth Addiction Care

Different types of rewards are applied in persuasive games to encourage play persistence of its users and facilitate the achievement of desired real-world goals, such as behavioral change. Persuasive games have successfully been applied in mental healthcare and may hold potential for different types of patients. However, we question to what...

Balancing Game Rules for Improving Creative Output of Group Brainstorms

This article describes a user-centered design experiment investigating positive and negative effects of adding game rules to brainstorms. We studied effects on brainstorm output and user experience and behavior. A coin-based gamification was developed with rules intended to improve brainstorm output in relation to quality and quantity of...

From smells to stories: The design and evaluation of the smell memory kit

The study presented is a research through design of the motivational, story sharing effects of smell, within the context of addiction care. This investigation led to the co-design of the Smell Memory Kit: a kit using eight selected smells as motivational elements to evoke and share autobiographical episodic stories among addiction care...

Personalization in Game Design for Healthcare: A Literature Review on its Definitions and Effects

Personalization, the involvement of stakeholders in the design process, is often applied in serious game design for health. It is expected to enhance the alignment of a game to the preferences and capacities of the end-user, thereby increasing the end-user’s motivation to interact with the game, which finally might enhance the aimed-for health...

Player Experiences and Behaviors in a Multiplayer Game: Designing game rules to change interdependent behavior

Serious gaming is used as a means for improving organizational teamwork, yet little is known about the effect of individual game elements constituting serious games. This paper presents a game design experiment aimed at generating knowledge on designing game elements for teamwork. In previous work, we suggested that interaction- and goal-driven...

A Haptic Serious Augmented Reality Game for Motor Assessment of Parkinson's Disease Patients

n the clinical community there is a need for assessment tools that allow for objective, quantitative and valid measures of motor dysfunction. In this paper, we report on the design and evaluation of a serious game that engages patients with Parkinson's disease in upper extremity (hand/arm) movements. The game employs augmented reality to show...

Personalized persuasive game design for youth addiction care

Applying persuasive games in mental healthcare contexts, especially using game-elements to support and redesign therapy, is a relatively new concept. In the youth addiction care context, patients often have comorbidities, causing a lot of differences between them. Besides this, therapists apply the therapy protocol in a specific personal way,...

Play Experiences for People with Alzheimer’s Disease

Little is known about the experience of people with dementia while playing games. This might be a reason why hardly any games are specifically designed for this group. We aimed to determine which play experiences can be expected to be suitable for persons in different stages of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Twenty-two play experiences were related...

Validation of serious games

The application of games for behavioral change has seen a surge in popularity but evidence on the efficacy of these games is contradictory. Anecdotal findings seem to confirm their motivational value whereas most quantitative findings from randomized controlled trials (RCT) are negative or difficult to interpret. One cause for the contradictory...

Persuasive Game Design: A model and its definitions

The following position paper proposes a general theoretical model for persuasive game design. This model combines existing theories on persuasive technology, serious gaming, and gamification. The model is based on user experience, gamification design, and transfer effects.

Social gaming rules: Changing people's behavior through games

In this paper we propose an approach towards designing social games or game elements for changing people’s social behavior for serious applications. We use the concept of the magic circle, which outlines the experience of a game world as different from the real world. We can design a connection between these worlds through space, time, and...