To enhance the persuasiveness of behaviour-change games, designers employ persuasive strategies. These persuasive strategies are intended to motivate the users towards the desired behaviours. Hence, the motivational appeal of these persuasive strategies can play an important role in the effectiveness of these behaviour-change games. Furthermore, research has shown that game framing can impact its effectiveness. Therefore, it is important to understand how the type of framing employed in the game impacts the effectiveness of persuasive strategies and their motivational appeal. To advance research in this direction, this paper explores the relationship between the perceived effectiveness of four popular persuasive strategies (reward, competition, praise and suggestion) and their motivational appeal in a persuasive game for healthy eating across the three different game framings: gain-framing, loss-framing or gain-loss-framing. In a study of 371 participants, our results revealed that all the persuasive strategies were perceived to be significantly effective across all game-framing versions. We also discovered that game framing had varying significant impacts on the relationship between the perceived effectiveness of persuasive strategies and their motivational appeal. We conclude by offering some insights on how to implement persuasive strategies to design games with better persuasive motivational appeal.

The assessment of software application usability typically relies on a predefined set of general principles known as heuristics. However, these heuristics are often used interchangeably to evaluate games across different platforms such as smartphones, tablets, and desktops, potentially leading to inconsistent or inaccurate evaluations. Hence, there is a notable absence of a standard platform-centric heuristics to evaluate games for a particular platform. In this paper, we address this gap by developing 144 smartphone game heuristics (SmGH), spanning across six categories and accounting for technical, non-technical, and gameplay aspects. Further, we compared our proposed SmGH with four mobile game heuristics published in the literature. The aim of the comparison was to identify the overlaps and differences between SmGH and the existing heuristics in mobile game literature. Lastly, we conducted a preliminarily assessment of the utility of SmGH using gameplay analysis of 5 popular smartphone games (from 2017 to 2021, having 4.5+ average rating and 100 M + downloads) and 12 recent smartphone games (released in 2022). We obtained two important findings. First, there is a limited overlap among various mobile game heuristics in the literature. The first finding highlights an important takeaway to establish a standard set of platform-specific heuristics in both game user research and the industry. Second, popular games tend to incorporate a larger proportion of heuristics compared to recently released games. The second finding provide insights into the number and distribution of heuristics across all six categories within smartphone games, which will be beneficial for future evaluations of new and unseen games using SmGH. The second finding also suggest that adherence to platform-centric game heuristics may contribute to a game’s popularity on a particular platform and could be a factor considered by game developers. This work contributes to the field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and smartphone games by advancing our understanding and application of platform-centric game heuristics and highlights the significance of SmGH as a standard and reliable set of heuristics in the design and evaluation of smartphone games.

Persuasive games have emerged as effective tools for behaviour change across diverse life domains, engaging and motivating players towards positive behaviours. An essential factor that may influence the effectiveness of persuasive games is their framing, which refers to the strategic design and presentation of the game’s context, mechanics, and objectives. This paper investigates the role of game framing in enhancing the perceived effectiveness of persuasive games or not, using the context of a healthy eating game with three different game framing versions (gain-framing, loss-framing and gain-loss framing). In a study of 371 participants, our results show that while all the framing types were effective at promoting behaviour change, gain-framing was perceived as significantly less effective when compared to loss-framing and gain-loss framing. We also explore potential differences in the perceived effectiveness of four persuasive strategies (reward, competition, praise, and suggestion) implementations across the three framing types. We concluded by exploring the reasons behind these results and their implications for designing persuasive games for various framing types.

The use of smartphones has become an integral part of everyone's lives. Due to the ubiquitous nature and multiple functionalities of smartphones, the data handled by these devices are sensitive in nature. Despite the measures companies take to protect users’ data, research has shown that people do not take the necessary actions to stay safe from security and privacy threats. Persuasive games have been implemented across various domains to motivate people towards a positive behaviour change. Even though persuasive games could be effective, research has shown that the one-size-fits-all approach to designing persuasive games might not be as effective as the tailored versions of the game. This paper presents the design and evaluation of a persuasive game to improve user awareness about smartphone security and privacy tailored to the user's motivational orientation using Regulatory Focus Theory. From the results of our mixed-methods in-the-wild study of 102 people followed by a one-on-one interview of 25 people, it is evident that the tailored version of the persuasive game performed better than the non-tailored version of the game towards improving users’ secure smartphone behaviour. We contribute to the broader HCI community by offering design suggestions and the benefits of tailoring persuasive games.

Games for change is a growing research field and studies have shown that these games can promote positive behavior change using various persuasive strategies. This article presents a systematic review of 130 persuasive games from the literature published in the last 21 years (2001–2021) to 1) highlight the current trends in the field with respect to domains, year, country, technology platforms, and genre; 2) identify what strategies are employed in the games and their comparative analysis across domains; 3) uncover various ways the persuasive strategies are operationalized in games; 4) explore for possible relationships between persuasive games effectiveness and the number of strategies employed; and 5) highlight gaps and opportunities for future research in the area of persuasive games. Our analysis reveals therewardstrategy is the most popular persuasive strategy employed in the persuasive games’ research. We also uncovered that, even though persuasive games have been strongly effective at promoting behavior change, there was a significant negative relationship between the number of persuasive strategies employed in persuasive games and their overall effectiveness. Based on these findings, we provide insights and design suggestions, operationalization, and assessment for persuasive games.

Persuasive systems (PS) are effective at motivating behaviour change using various persuasive strategies. Research shows that tailoring these systems increases their effectiveness. However, there is little knowledge on how PS can be tailored to people's Stages of Change (SoC). We conduct a large-scale study of 568 participants to investigate how individuals at different SoC respond to various strategies. We also explore why the strategies motivate behaviour change using the ARCS motivation model. Our results show that people's SoC plays a significant role in the perceived persuasiveness of different strategies and that the strategies motivate for different reasons. For instance, people at the precontemplation stage tend to be strongly motivated by self-monitoring strategy because it raises their consciousness or self-awareness. Our work is the first to link research on the theory of SoC with the theory of motivation and Persuasive Systems Design (PSD) model to develop practical guidelines to inform the tailoring of persuasive systems.