P-Gamer: A Domain-Independent Platform for Tailoring Persuasive Games and Studying their Effectiveness.

Abstract

Persuasive games for health are interventions designed to promote behaviour change through various persuasive strategies. Understanding the effectiveness of these strategies before implementing them is crucial in the design lifecycle of persuasive systems. There is a growing need for quick, cost-effective methods to evaluate persuasive gamified systems before their release. Therefore, we propose a domain-independent persuasive game framework to assess the effectiveness and user responses elicited by persuasive strategies. Furthermore, while research has demonstrated the effectiveness of persuasive strategies in motivating behaviour change, there is limited knowledge about the impact of application domains and game framing on the effectiveness of these strategies. To address these gaps, after a comprehensive systematic review of persuasive games in research, we developed a platform called P-Gamer—a domain-independent persuasive game platform—to evaluate the effectiveness and user responses of persuasive strategies. We conducted usability studies to assess (a) the usability of the P-Gamer Platform. Additionally, we generated persuasive games from the platform and conducted a study involving 371 participants to investigate (b) the impact of application domains on the perceived effectiveness of persuasive strategies; (c) the impact of game framing on the perceived effectiveness of persuasive strategies; (d) the impact of game framing on the relationship between the effectiveness of persuasive strategies and their motivational appeal; and (e) the relationships between gamer types and the perceived effectiveness of persuasive strategies across game framings. Our results show that the P-Gamer platform was usable and could easily be used to generate persuasive games and associated studies without the need for coding. The findings also revealed that application domains and game framing significantly influence the perceived effectiveness of persuasive strategies, particularly concerning gamer types and the motivational appeal of the implemented strategies. We offer design suggestions for developing persuasive games for health, tailored to individual preferences based on these factors.