Collective action is required to tackle urgent global challenges in energy and climate, biodiversity and food, and peace and security. The United Nations, therefore, adopted 17 global Sustainable Development Goals, to be met by 2030. Implementing these goals has proven to be no mean feat, but they are essential to establishing a sustainable society of ecological, social, and economic stability far into the future.

Psychological processes can provide insights into the dynamics of the complex problems that come with the current challenges. One key psychological component of many of these problems is the need for behavioral change on multiple levels. To stimulate such change, the public sector, societal actors, and the private sector can initiate behavioral interventions, ideally changing behavior simultaneously and consistently on population, community, and individual levels. Intervention frameworks like the Behaviour Change Wheel (BCW)1 can be helpful for a systematic approach to developing such behavioral interventions.

In addition to the BCW, using persuasive games2 as an intervention tool looks promising. Persuasive games seem able to influence players’ Capability (including knowledge and skills) and Motivation (all brain processes that energize and direct behavior), two components of the BCW that theoretically directly influence behavior. Moreover, these games can create personal experiences, making societal issues that may feel overwhelming and far away understandable and relevant, even for skeptics. Crucial to this is that the game’s message is interweaved within the game’s content without the risk of explicit approaches to persuasion that can backfire or be of limited use.

Still, despite the widespread application and promising impact of persuasive games, evaluation studies’ results often seem inconclusive. Game scholars, therefore, conclude that there is still a long way to go before the viability of games as a persuasive medium can be firmly determined. This dissertation attempts to make a positive contribution to this task.

Any research that aims to increase the impact of persuasive games, particularly how they can convey Meaning (ensuring that the game will serve its goal and support knowledge transfer)3, seems like a welcome contribution to the validation research field of persuasive games. Within the context of persuasive games that promote a sustainable society, a focus on reducing players’ attitude-behavior gap seems particularly relevant to strengthen this Meaning. The gap exists when individuals’ attitudes do not correlate with their actions. People can be conflicted by several factors that lead to inaction, although they often agree that action is required. For example, many people agree that humans cause climate change and that it needs to be addressed. However, they still do not make the necessary personal sacrifices to adjust their lifestyle. To reduce the attitude-behavior gap, it seems essential to strengthen people’s behavioral intentions. According to the influential Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB)4, behavioral intentions are the most direct determinants of human behavior. They are directly influenced by one’s attitudes, subjective norm, and perceived control. In addition to these three behavioral predictors, it also seems relevant to examine the factor of responsibility to improve the behavioral impact of games for a sustainable society, as the attitude-behavior gap may be partly caused by people’s lack of responsibility to put their intentions into action...

Classical music venues in the Netherlands and throughout the world are struggling to attract new audiences. Especially younger visitors are underrepresented. Previous research emphasizes the importance of providing new, potentially interested audiences with more means to consume the music. This paper presents an exploratory case study with the persuasive game Listening Space which we developed to help attract new audiences and thus preserve Western classical music heritage. In particular, we studied to what extent this game could promote more varied ways of listening to classical music and thus enrich the experience of visiting a classical music concert. We designed and executed a controlled randomized trial with surveys before and after the experiment as well as a series of in-depth interviews with participants after the experiment. Our treatment group consisted of 139 participants (both new and existing visitors). They played our digital game at their own convenience, followed by a visit to a concert in a renowned classical music concert hall. A control group of 165 participants only visited the concerts. We measured the effects of the game - changes in the ways participants listen to classical music - through self-report in questionnaires before and after the experiment. Results show that Listening Space seems most effective for new audiences: the game promoted more varied ways of listening in the treatment group and thus enriched their experience of visiting a classical music concert. The control group of new visitors did not show an effect and also no differences were found between the treatment and control groups of regular visitors of classical music concerts We employed regression analysis to identify predictors of the game's effect on listening styles: participants' age and their level of appreciation of the classical music genre were negatively related to the effectiveness of the game. The way in which participants experienced the game also significantly influenced the effectiveness. This case study shows the potential of using games to promote classical music concerts: games seem to be valuable in attracting new, young audiences and, therefore, represent powerful instruments to help preserve Western classical music cultural heritage.

This paper explores the context dependency of four popular persuasive game design principles in order to improve their effective implementation. To prevent the use of badly chosen design principles that can be counterproductive, other authors showed the importance of tailoring persuasive game design principles to various gamer personalities. In this paper we aim to further theoretically explore the context dependency of four popular principles. With the elaboration likelihood model as a framework, we present examples of different scenarios that describe how these four persuasive game design principles can either enhance or reduce the motivation and/or ability of the player to elaborate on the persuasive message of the game. Although we emphasize the theoretical nature of this paper, it may form a starting point for experimental research on persuasive game design principles. Results from this future research will ultimately contribute to the overall effectiveness of persuasive games, whose application is valuable within an active learning context.

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.