Affective and Bodily Involvement in Children’s Tablet Play


Waern Annika Bohne Gunnar
2015 DiGRA '15 - Proceedings of the 2015 DiGRA International Conference

The rapid development of tablet applications targeting pre-school children presents us with challenging questions concerning how this age group engages with the applications. We performed a study with a tablet game designed to teach pre-school children about emotions, studying their mode of engagement and their understanding of the game. The purpose of the study was to provide insights into what play activities are encouraged by tablet play. The study showed clearly that even though the interactivity of the game was very limited, the children understood the social and emotional aspects of the game content very well. We also found that the children would sometimes engage affectively and dramatically with the game content; we highlight in particular instances of bodily involvement with the game. We argue that tablet games offer design opportunities for children in this age range that may be less relevant for older children, by taking corporeal play around the tablet into account. While none of the models for computer game-based learning and persuasion that have been proposed in literature constitutes a perfect fit to the behavior observed in our study, we find some resonance in the concept of procedural rhetorics in the way the players' interaction with the game serves to complete a rhetorical argument; in this case the storyline of the game. The children's dramatic involvement may potentially serve to strengthen such arguments.

 

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


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


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.

 

Presence and Heuristic Cues: Cognitive Approaches to Persuasion in Games


Christiansen Peter
2014 DiGRA '14 - Proceedings of the 2014 DiGRA International Conference

Just as rhetorical arguments can be embedded within the structure of a game's logic, so too can heuristic cues. In this paper, I argue for persuasive game design based upon using the technological affordances of videogames as a medium to trigger specific heuristic cues, thereby allowing game designers to create games that are able to evoke the necessary amount of systematic cognitive processing to promote long-term attitude change among players of the game. This approach is based upon the Heuristic-Systematic Model (HSM) of cognition, as well as the MAIN (Modality, Agency, Interactivity, and Navigability) model of technological effects.

 

Thanatogaming: Death, Videogames, and the Biopolitical State


Christiansen Peter
2014 DiGRA '14 - Proceedings of the 2014 DiGRA International Conference

In response to the rise of the biopolitical state, which derives power from its ability to “make live” and “let die,” some scholars have argued that death itself can serve as a form of resistance to biopower. As virtual worlds become increasingly intertwined with the physical world, the concept of in-game death can have rhetorical force to resist both physical and virtual biopower. This paper draws on examples of death as resistance with in the virtual worlds of America's Army and World of Warcraft.

 

A Conceptual Model for the Study of Persuasive Games


de la Hera Conde-Pumpido Teresa
2014 DiGRA '13 - Proceedings of the 2013 DiGRA International Conference: DeFragging Game Studies

In this paper I propose a new theory for the study of persuasiveness within digital games. This theory aims to make visible how persuasiveness can be structured within digital games and to be useful to identify specific aspects of games' persuasiveness that might not be obvious to the naked eye, by giving them order and conferring them intelligibility. The theory that I propose here is based on the hypothesis that multiple persuasive dimensions can be used within digital games to convey persuasive messages. In order to defend this hypothesis I introduce the concept of 'persuasive structures', which I use to describe how persuasive communication works within digital games. The definition of this concept relies on a conceptual model that is based on the proposition that persuasiveness within digital games can be developed through three different persuasive levels and that in each of the three persuasive levels it is possible to find different persuasive dimensions.

 

Newsgames – Procedural Rhetoric Meets Political Cartoons


Treanor Mike
2009 DiGRA '09 - Proceedings of the 2009 DiGRA International Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory

Video games have been created about political and social issues since the early days of the medium. In recent years, many developers are rapidly creating and releasing games in response to current events. These games are being referred to as newsgames. With an increasing number of people citing the internet as their primary news source, it would appear that newsgames could become an important part of how people understand current events and could rise to be an important and expressive video game genre. However, the word “newsgame” is currently only quite loosely defined, resulting in the term being applied to many forms of serious, or nonfiction games. Also, despite the quantity of games that relate to current events, very few newsgames can be said live up to the defining claims that newsgames are the video game equivalent of political cartoons [25] – a well developed and established medium for political expression. This paper fleshes out the political cartoon comparison in order to learn from the long history of political cartoons and give direction to the current state of fledgling and unsophisticated newsgames. It also suggests clear and flexible definitive criteria for newsgames as well as a redeclaration of their expressive power.

 

Persuasive design of a mobile energy conservation game with direct feedback and social cues


Bang Magnus Svahn Mattias Gustafsson Anton
2009 DiGRA '09 - Proceedings of the 2009 DiGRA International Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory

Pervasive gaming has the potential of transforming the home into a persuasive environment in which the user can learn about appliances and their electricity consumption. Power Explorer is a mobile game with a special sensing approach that provides real-time electricity measurements and feedback when the user switches on and off devices in the home. The game was developed based on persuasive principles to provide an engaging means to learn about energy with positive and negative feedback and social feedback from peers on real energy actions in the home. We present the design and rationale of this game and discuss how pervasive games can be viewed from a persuasive and learning point of view.

 

Designing Games to Effect Social Change


Swain Chris
2007 DiGRA '07 - Proceedings of the 2007 DiGRA International Conference: Situated Play

Serious games, persuasive games, news games – these are all terms used for games which let players gain an experiential understanding of real world issues through play. Many in this growing class of games deal with social causes; recent examples include Peacemaker, about solving Middle East peace, The Redistricting Game, about congressional redistricting and redistricting reform, and the online game series published by the New York Times that includes Food Import Folly (which is about the FDA limited inspection policy on U.S. food imports). The field has a number of good examples that let users learn about social issues, however, to date, the field is short on examples of games that achieve measurable results in the real world. This paper addresses issues of design, theory, and activism pertaining to games about social causes. The author is an experienced designer and scholar who deals with all three of these issues in his work. Here is an outline of best practices for designing games to affect social change. Each is discussed in detail below: 1. Define intended outcomes 2. Integrate subject matter experts 3. Partner with like-minded organizations 4. Build sustainable community 5. Embrace “wicked problems” 6. Maintain journalistic integrity 7. Measure transference of knowledge 8. Make it fun