Tailoring persuasive health games to gamer type

Abstract

Persuasive games are an effective approach for motivating health behavior, and recent years have seen an increase in games designed for changing human behaviors or attitudes. However, these games are limited in two major ways: first, they are not based on theories of what motivates healthy behavior change. This makes it difficult to evaluate why a persuasive approach works. Second, most persuasive games treat players as a monolithic group. As an attempt to resolve these weaknesses, we conducted a large-scale survey of 642 gamers' eating habits and their associated determinants of healthy behavior to understand how health behavior relates to gamer type. We developed seven different models of healthy eating behavior for the gamer types identified by BrainHex. We then explored the differences between the models and created two approaches for effective persuasive game design based on our results. The first is a one-sizefits-all approach that will motivate the majority of the population, while not demotivating any players. The second is a personalized approach that will best motivate a particular type of gamer. Finally, to make our approaches actionable in persuasive game design, we map common game mechanics to the determinants of healthy behavior.

Gamification of Older Adults’ Physical Activity: An Eight-Week Study

“…In digital gaming for seniors, game preferences and motivations to play the game were true-to-life scenarios, cognitive training, and improving their reflexes [46]. Furthermore, in-person and electronically mediated interventions through persuasive games [52] and interpersonal communications [50] are effective for influencing and motivating health behaviour to participate in more PA [47].…”

“…The benefits of gamified applications as referenced above range from increased motivation [7], improved monitoring daily activities, and tracking of goal-attainment [47]. Furthermore, gamified applications afford to connect individuals via a community [52].…”

How Self-Esteem Shapes our Interactions with Play Technologies

“…Research suggests that there may be individual differences in player experience between groups of players, for example, older adults having different perceptions of multiplayer games [9] and people from different cultures experiencing persuasive games differently [16] Other research on games for health shows that individual differences between players in terms of their play style not only affect their experience, but also extend to how messages conveyed by games are perceived [28].…”

Personalization in Serious and Persuasive Games and Gamified Interactions

“…They do not only focus on imparting knowledge and raising awareness about a topic or an issue, but also on attitude or behavior change in a desirable direction, e.g. towards a more healthy lifestyle [15]. In a broader view, other game-like applications (which can be used for promoting learning, attitude, and behavior) such as gamified interactive systems can also have a persuasive goal.…”

“…The effectiveness of personalized systems over "one-size-fits-all" approaches also applies to interactive systems in general. For example, the efficacy of personalization has been shown in personality-targeted user interface design [12], persuasive technology [8,9] and games [1,3,15]. Personalization has been investigated along several dimensions, such as personality [12], cognitive abilities [4], gender [16], persuadability (the susceptibility to persuasive strategies, [10]) as well as player types [15] and gamification user types [11].…”