Investigating the Effects of a Persuasive Digital Game on Immersion, Identification, and Willingness to Help

Abstract

Recent years have seen a tremendous rise in the development and distribution of persuasive games: digital games that are used to influence players’ attitudes and/or behavior. Three studies (N_{Study 1} = 134; N_{Study 2} = 94; N_{Study 3} = 161) tested the effects of a persuasive game on immersion, identification, and willingness to help. The results showed that playing the persuasive game did not result in substantially stronger willingness to help, relative to the control conditions. Video and printed text resulted in more immersion than the digital game, but playing the game resulted in substantially higher perceptions of embodied presence.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful for the thoughtful comments provided by the two reviewers of our paper.

Notes

1 While the first and third author were collecting data for Study 2, the second and fourth author, at another institution, were collecting data for Study 3. No communication took place between the teams during the design and data collection stages, hence the subtle differences in operationalization between Studies 1 and 2, on one hand, and Study 3, on the other hand. When sharing our work afterward, the similarities between the studies (and the results) were so striking that it seemed only natural to report them together.

Additional information

Funding

Jansz’s research is part of the program “Persuasive Gaming. From Theory-Based Design to Validation and Back” (project number 314-99-106), which is (partly) financed by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research.