A Breathtaking Journey. Appealing to Empathy in a Persuasive Mixed-Reality Game

Persuasive games are designed for a variety of objectives, from marketing to healthcare and activism. Some of the more socially aware ones cast players as members of disenfranchised minorities, prompting them to see what they see. In parallel, designers have started to leverage system-immersion to enable players to temporarily feel like another person, to sense what they sense. From these converging perspectives, we hypothesize a stilluncharted space of opportunities at the crossroads of games, empathy, persuasion, and system-immersion. We explored this space by designing A Breathtaking Journey, a mixed-reality game providing a first-person perspective of a refugee’s journey. A qualitative study was conducted to tease out empathy-arousing characteristics, provide insights on empathic experiences, and contribute three design opportunities: visceral engagement, reflective moments, and affective appeals.

Persuasive Gaming in Context

The rapid developments of new communication technologies have facilitated the popularization of digital games, which has translated into an exponential growth of the game industry in the last decades. The ubiquitous presence of digital games has resulted in an expansion of the applications of these games from mere entertainment purposes to a great variety of serious purposes. In this edited volume, we narrow the scope of attention by focusing on what game theorist Ian Bogost has called "persuasive games", that is, gaming practices that combine the dissemination of information with attempts to engage players in particular attitudes and behaviors. This volume offers a multifaceted reflection on persuasive gaming, that is, on the process of these particular games being played by players. The purpose is to better understand when and how digital games can be used for persuasion, by further exploring persuasive games and some other kinds of persuasive playful interaction as well. The book critically integrates what has been accomplished in separate research traditions to offer a multidisciplinary approach to understanding persuasive gaming that is closely linked to developments in the industry by including the exploration of relevant case studies.

Persuasive Gaming: From Theory-Based Design to Validation and Back. An Introduction

This chapter offers a multifaceted reflection on persuasive gaming divided into three pillars: persuasiveness, design, and validation. The first section on persuasiveness is a critical review of previous and current persuasive gaming theory and analysis. It argues that the contemporary gaming landscape needs to expand theoretically and presents a multidimensional persuasive approach as one way in which this can be done. The following section on the design of persuasive games looks at research on design principles, which are the defining characteristics of persuasive games. The final section on validation discusses existing studies on the effects of persuasive games and the case-based assessment of the impact of new games.

Mitigating Bias and Improving Professional Decision-Making through Persuasive Training Games

Making accurate, unbiased decisions is critical in high-stakes professions such as law enforcement, intelligence analysis, and medicine, since the decisions can have severe consequences. In this chapter, we discuss what makes persuasive games effective for training professionals to recognize their cognitive biases, improve their knowledge about decision-making biases, and learn ways of mitigating bias. We describe our experience designing three games for professional training in cognitive biases and deception detection. This chapter focuses on the combination of decisionmaking, education, and game theories that drives our design. This is then followed by a discussion of our experiments and measurements for testing the effectiveness of our designs.

Macro, Micro, and Meta-Persuasive Play to Change Society

This chapter examines persuasive games through the dominant arguments made about the value of such designed play. Beyond the who, what, and where, there is the why. Why do researchers and practitioners want to persuade people through games? Why are games the right—or potentially wrong—medium for delivering persuasive messages? Why has public discourse come to need games as a vehicle for communicating and argumentation? Why has the design of such play grown into an increasingly media-rich environment that is seemingly adrift, unable to decant the real from its opposite?

The Present of Persuasion : Escalating Research into Persuasive Game Effects

The process of validating persuasive games involves demonstrating that such games are changing or reinforcing specific sets of attitudes in their players. The first wave of validation efforts consisted of simple effect studies in which a full game was compared to other persuasive media or straightforward control conditions. While this led to the conclusion that some persuasive games did indeed ‘work’, it did not afford generalizations on the viability of gaming as a persuasive medium. We describe these first efforts before showing how subsequent studies are evolving from determining the effects of individual games to testing player-oriented experiential models accounting for multiple persuasive mechanisms. Our conclusions draw on psychological and media-psychological theories of persuasion to offer a roadmap to validating persuasive games.

Persuasive Games, A Decade Later

More than a decade ago, Bogost invented the concept of ‘procedural rhetoric’—the idea that games and software can make arguments through their mechanics. Even earlier, he founded a studio called Persuasive Games that adopted procedural rhetoric as a design philosophy. These ideas have had some influence on game studies and design, including finding their way into the title of this volume. And yet the promise of persuasive games in the world as a force that would introduce systems literacy to the mass media has not been successful. What happened, and what—if anything—can be done about it?