Researching What Makes Persuasive Games Effective

In a previous blog for the Page Center, I described a research project focused on a persuasive health game – a game designed to convey a message of healthy eating to college students. The game combines a simple matching mechanism with a quota system to show players how to collect the appropriate balance of food types for a healthy daily caloric intake. The game was created specifically for this project, with the help of three talented Penn State undergraduate students.

The research project was designed to investigate which aspects of the game might have the strongest impact on people’s attitudes toward the game’s messages. The purpose of this line of research, which I’m working on with several projects, is to determine how organizations or individuals can best communicate with their audiences via computer and video games, which are increasingly popular communication media.

According to previous research, games should be able to communicate persuasive messages via both the gameplay itself and any narrative embedded within the game. In my game, for example, the quota system conveyed the importance of a balanced diet, and the narrative reinforced this idea by explaining how college students – the target audience – could eat healthily.

While prior research suggests that gameplay and narrative arguments should reinforce each other, few researchers have directly compared gameplay and narrative arguments. In my research, I’m attempting to do that through experimental studies that manipulate aspects of gameplay and narrative and then measure attitudes toward included gameplay and narrative arguments.

Specifically, students who participated in my experiment played either a game with a health narrative, a game with health information, or a control game with no health content. I also asked these students – both before and after the test – about their attitudes toward health messages embedded in the game’s gameplay and in the game’s narrative.

Results of this experiment show that attitudes toward messages from the game were improved across the board as a result of playing the game. For example, after playing the game, the students were more likely to agree with the idea that college students need to be in charge of their own nutrition, which was an embedded narrative argument. Similarly, they were also more willing to agree that matching things by color is important, an argument embedded in the gameplay.

These attitude changes, however, were not directly attributable to the changes I made to the game’s narrative or gameplay. In other words, the students saw similar improvements in their healthy attitudes regardless of whether they played the game with a health narrative, the game that only contained health information, or even the game that contained no health information at all. A similar change in the difficulty of the game was also not directly responsible for the attitude changes, as I had expected.

I am still working with the data to investigate whether the changes I made to the game may be indirectly related to the attitude changes I observed. At this point, however, I am not definitively able to state what makes the game persuasive, just that it was. While my research certainly needs further refinement, the fact that the game was able to change and improve students’ attitudes toward health shows that communicating organizational or other persuasive messages through games is a viable option, but further research is need to determine why.