Selecting Effective Strategies for Tailoring Persuasive Health Games to Gamer Types
Rita Orji, Regan Lee Mandryk, Julita Vassileva · 2014
Persuasive games can be effective tools for motivating healthy behaviors and/or attitudes, and so recent years have witnessed an increasing number of persuasive games. However, most games adopt a one-size-fits-all approach to persuasion in their design. Studies on gameplay and player motivation have shown that treating gamers as a monolithic group is a bad design approach because a motivational approach that works for one individual may actually demotivate the desired behavior in others. To correct this problem, we conducted a large-scale study on 1108 gamers, which examined the persuasiveness of ten Persuasive Technology (PT) strategies, and the receptiveness of seven gamer types identified by BrianHex to the strategies most commonly used in PT design. We developed models showing the receptiveness of the gamer types to the ten strategies and created persuasive profiles, which are lists of strategies that can be employed to motivate behavior for each gamer type. Although we studied and created our models using ten strategies, in this paper, we report results of five strategies. Keywords Persuasive game; gamer types; persuasive strategies; health;