A Hostile World

A Hostile World is a persuasive game designed for an urban context with a high level of multiethnic presence, a recurrent feature of the contemporary megalopolis. Our players are ordinary native citizens who are plunged into an alternative reality where they can realize how complex and demanding it is to deal with gestures and tasks of everyday life in a foreign context, trusting them to live a destabilizing experience that aims to increase the sensitivity, understanding, and empathy towards foreigners, soothing the existing multicultural tensions. The game is a quest-based system; quests recreate situations of everyday-life needs, from shopping to bureaucratic adventures; it's designed to be modular and its sessions may change in the number and quality of quests adapting to different cities, contexts, and targets. The authors identify its effectiveness through the analysis of data collected during and after actual gameplay.

Rhetoric of Game

The Tavistock method, commonly known as group relations, was originated from the work of British psychoanalyst Wilfred Ruprecht Bion. The Tavistock method's basic premise is that an aggregate cluster of persons becomes a group when interaction between members occurs. Within a group, there is organizational politics, and there are two features of organizational politic that should be considered when investigating its relationships with employee attitudes and behaviors. First, perceptions are more important than reality. Second, organizational politics may be interpreted as either beneficial or detrimental to an individual's well-being. Thus, organizational politics perceptions may result in differing responses to organizational policies and practices depending on whether politics are viewed as an opportunity or as a threat. How well one survives within an organization is correlated with how well one navigates these organizational politics. The Tavistock method is utilized as a game to assess and train individuals on organizational politics.

Games for Top Civil Servants

In designing De BurgemeesterGame—The Mayor Game—we aimed to develop a game that would be used and appreciated by a target population that was hardly used to being trained and had little affinity with applied gaming: mayors. To make sure that the (learning) goals, the context, the characteristics of the target population, and the creative design were all integrated into the game, we chose to work in a consortium with a focus group. We included engaging elements like simple gameplay based on actual processes, authentic scenarios presented in the way of dilemmas, time pressure, and collaboration. This resulted in a game that was accepted by the target population and has been played by more than half of all mayors in The Netherlands. Mayors feel the game challenges them to explore their decision making during crisis management and stimulates them to discuss this with other mayors.

Football Manager as a Persuasive Game for Social Identity Formation

This case illustrates the way in which the football management simulation game, Football Manager (Sports Interactive), enhances the processes through which players formulate their social identities, which extend beyond the boundaries of gameplay itself. The case discusses the findings of my interviews with Football Manager players, which provides an in-depth examination of experiences associated with the game, both during gameplay and the way in which it functions within the wider social contexts of their lives. I discuss these findings in relation to social identity theory (Tajfel, 1978, 1979; Tajfel & Turner, 1979), through the way in which the game promotes players' sense of in-group affiliation, as well as promoting positive shared experiences between players. In this way, the current case presents an interesting insight into the social functions of the game and its role within the social narratives and identities of its players. From this, I conclude the utility of Football Manager as a persuasive game for formulating players' social identities, which may lead to further positive social impacts.

Game-Based Learning as a Promoter for Positive Health Behaviours in Young People

Maintaining the healthcare of young people living with long-term medical conditions is dependent upon them acquiring a range of self-care skills. Encouraging them to attain these as well as assessing their competency in them beyond the healthcare setting is challenging. The development of educational computer games like Health Heroes, Re-Mission, and Sparx have been shown to successfully improve self-care, communication, and adherence to medicines in young patients. Therefore, this medium might be an alternative means for delivery of healthcare information. In this chapter, we propose that by encapsulating healthcare processes in Game-Based Learning (GBL) either by computer games or by applying the principles of gamification, a more fun, structured, and objective process would be created, one to which young people can relate. The framework we suggest will provide doctors with an insight into how GBL could be used positively in a healthcare setting as well as provide a basis for application to other disciplines where knowledge and skill acquisition can be challenging.

Six Factors That Determine the Conceptualization of Persuasive Strategies for Advergames

In this chapter, I define six factors that determine the conceptualization of persuasive strategies for advergames. Advergames are understood here as “digital games specifically designed for a brand with the aim of conveying an advertising message” (De la Hera Conde-Pumpido, In Press). These six factors have been used for the analysis of the advergame Tem de Tank (DDB Amsterdam & Flavour, 2010), which was launched in 2010 by Volkswagen to introduce the Volkswagen Polo BlueMotion. The reason for selecting this game as a case study for this chapter is that, although the advergame's goals were properly defined, the game contains, in my opinion, a series of problems in terms of persuasion. Therefore, this game is a perfect case study to exemplify how the factors presented here can be useful to identify problems in the persuasive strategy of an advergame.

Equality Game, Anxiety Attack, and Misfortune

In this chapter, I present a post-mortem covering three consecutive offerings of a course on persuasive games at the university level over a three-year period from 2010 – 2013. The course, “Designing Persuasive Games,” is part of a larger, multi-disciplinary program on digital media and game design. In this course, students are invited to engage both with theory and praxis, the process of “practicing” theory (Shaffer, 2004), by not only reading and writing about persuasive games but also through the design and development of one. Here, I present the overall design of the course across the three offerings and describe the most significant aspects of the course, from a pedagogical perspective, that I believe to be of value to others designing similar courses. These aspects include choosing a game engine, scaling projects to retain rhetoric, modding as praxis, and player experience testing. A sample grading rubric for persuasive games is also included at the conclusion of this chapter.

Strategies and Tactics in Digital Role-Playing Games

In this chapter, the authors examine the strategies and tactics of persuasion used by the players in the Gorean role-playing games organized in Second Life, which is a video gaming adaptation of the series of novels The Chronicles of Gor by John Norman, games in which a doctrine is both defended and contested. These strategies and tactics fall into six different categories of closure conveyed in Gorean role-playing games: institutionalized enculturation, informal enculturation, hermeneutical closure, sociotechnical closure, narrative closure, and legal closure. The chapter shows that the PRPG-VE is an inadequate medium when it comes to conveying a persuasive message to a target, but it can be useful in the context of a media critical education program.

The ASPIRE Program

The ASPIRE Program is a science outreach program that was designed with the goal of teaching basic physics and math to middle school students and encouraging them to take an early interest in science. Our main tool in achieving this goal is a series of online games and activities that are designed to supplement classroom learning. The use of videogames as a teaching tool has enabled ASPIRE to reach thousands of students per day, while maintaining an average staff of only two or three employees. Although the games themselves are online, much of the success of ASPIRE can be attributed to connections with educators made through more traditional outreach activities. These connections serve as both a source of feedback for improving pro-learning behavioral effects in players and as a means of raising awareness for the games themselves.

Communicating the Obvious

This chapter describes the game design and study of Agents Against Power Waste (AAPW), a large-scale field experiment where a persuasive pervasive game was put to use to influence households' attitudes towards electricity consumption. This game is particularly interesting as, although it was only the children of the family who were playing, the whole family was affected and to some extent forced to take part in the play activity. The style of game design has been called “social expansion” (Montola, Stenros, & Waern, 2009; Montola, 2011).The chapter focuses on how this impacted the psychological process of persuasion in responding families and individuals.