Playing with the Kitchen Table: Using persuasive games to promote empathy for persons with anaphylactic food allergies

Abstract

This article focuses on the design and preliminary experimentation of a tabletop game called Kitchen Table, created to encourage more empathy towards people with severe anaphylactic food allergies. To measure the effectiveness of this game, the study ‘Use of persuasive games to promote empathy for persons with food allergies’ was conducted at the University of Waterloo in collaboration with the Games Institute and Department of Geography and Environmental Management's Genetics, Environment and Therapies: Food Allergy Clinical Tolerance Studies (GET-FACTS) project. This study involved volunteers completing a Likert scale-based pre-playtest questionnaire, playing the game, and then completing a post-playtest questionnaire identical to the original. Their pre-playtest and post-playtest responses were compared to measure the degree to which attitudes changed as a result of playing the game. In the end, the game was demonstrated to encourage more empathy towards people with severe anaphylaxis through the production of emergent narrative from the interaction between the players, the game mechanics and the participatory community experience.