Creating Stealth Game Interventions for Attitude and Behavior Change: An “Embedded Design” Model

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Kaufman Geoff Flanagan Mary Seidman Max
2015 DiGRA '15 - Proceedings of the 2015 DiGRA International Conference

Persuasive games tackling serious issues in a literal, explicit fashion are far less likely to succeed in changing attitudes or behaviors than are games that take the more “stealthy” approach of embedding persuasive messages within a game’s content or context. The “Embedded Design” model, which we introduce here, offers novel, evidence-based strategies for including persuasive content in a game in a fashion that circumvents players’ psychological defenses, triggers a more receptive mindset for internalizing a game’s intended message, and does so without sacrificing players’ enjoyment or the game’s replayability. Such techniques promise to revolutionize the ways that game developers tackle serious issues in games. Three original “embedding” strategies are presented: (1) Intermixing: balancing “on-message” and “off-message” content to render the former less overt or threatening; (2) Obfuscating: using framing devices or genres that divert expectations or focus away from the game’s persuasive intent; and (3) Distancing: employing fiction and metaphor to increase the psychological gap between players’ identities and beliefs and the game’s characters and persuasive content.

 

Failed Games: Lessons Learned from Promising but Problematic Game Prototypes in Designing for Diversity

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Seidman Max Flanagan Mary Kaufman Geoff
2015 DiGRA '15 - Proceedings of the 2015 DiGRA International Conference

Iterative game design approaches have proven effective in creating persuasive games, but these approaches inevitably lead to as many abandoned designs as ones that are pursued to completion. This paper serves as a reflective and instructive post mortem for the unpublished non-digital game prototypes developed for our team’s “Transforming STEM for Women and Girls: Reworking Stereotypes & Bias” (BIAS) research project. We outline three abandoned designs and explain why they were ultimately not pursued, focusing on the challenges of balancing enjoyability, feasibility of production, and impact. We discuss design strategies, including: masking games’ persuasive intentions, prioritizing prototypes with their efficacy-to-cost ratio in mind, and designing for fun first. This discussion offers insights into the design of both non-digital and digital “games for impact” that allow designers and researchers alike to learn from these promising but problematic prototypes.

 

Citizen Archivists at Play: Game Design for Gathering Metadata for Cultural Heritage Institutions

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Flanagan Mary Punjasthitkul Sukdith Seidman Max Kaufman Geoff Carini Peter
2014 DiGRA '13 - Proceedings of the 2013 DiGRA International Conference: DeFragging Game Studies

In this paper, we detail our design process for the Metadata Games project and discuss a number of design challenges involved in making a “metadata game,” such as incentivizing players to offer accurate information, devising and deploying methods for verifying the accuracy of data, and introducing effective motivations for ensuring high replay potential. We present our “Outlier Design” model for creating effective crowdsourcing applications, and offer the Metadata Games prototype One-Up as an example. This game’s design addresses the challenges of gathering increasingly higher quality metadata while creating a compelling play experience.

 

Preventing a POX Among the People? A Design Case Study of a Public Health Game

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Flanagan Mary Seidman Max Belman Jonathan Punjasthitkul Sukdith Downs Zara Ayoob Mike Driscoll Alicia
2011 DiGRA '11 - Proceedings of the 2011 DiGRA International Conference: Think Design Play

The POX: Save the People game was developed to address some of the core concepts included in curricular frameworks for Science Literacy in the USA. This paper documents our design research, design approach, and prototyping process.