Embedded Design For Attitude And Behavioral Change-Kaufman
id: Embedded Design For Attitude And Behavioral Change-Kaufman aliases: [] tags: []
#notesFromPaper Year : Tags : Authors: Kaufman Flanagan Seidman
embedded design is a powerful way to avoid psychological reactance. Discusses biases somewhat.
Intermixing: Balance on message and off message content
Having moments of humor and levity, of off-message content.
Obfuscating: Use framing devices to divert focus away from the game’s message.
(They discuss the delayed revelation, only informing players of a characters, e.g. sexual orientation, after they’ve created a bond. Used in the game Monarch, where boys aren’t told they’re playing girls.) (2019)
Distancing: Use fiction to increase the gap between player identity and persuasive content.
No examples from the player’s real life, but instead hypotheticals. Explicitly fictional narratives (e.g. A story about a zombie virus instead of a real life virus. See Lost in Translation, 2016 or 2013 depending on who you ask)
Other strategies:
Misattribution of arousal is when you create alternate explanations for why things are so intense, such as a horror game that also explores STEM for underrepresented populations. Players think things are intense because of the horror, not the anxiety of the game itself. (To 2018)
Implicit priming, such as the use of color or positive images or text to prime certain emotional states.
Awkward moments is a party game where players are presented with a “moment card” representing an awkward moment that could occur to a teenager (e.g. “accidentally sat in Ketchup”). The players then play reaction cards. Most of the cards are simply humorous, but a few relate to feminism and gender bias in STEM (e.g. “somebody hacks your Facebook account and changes your status to ‘Girls are stupid’”). Interestingly, presenting a lower level of on-message cards led to more transformation among players. (2015)
AM also had obfuscating, where the party game aspect of the game both obfuscated the intent, and created a safe, humurous space for players to engage with the game.
In Luminists, a game where players had to interact with STEM role models, having an equal mix of female and male role models was more effective than a version where female role models outnumbered their male counterparts. (2018)
Buffalo: they didn’t market it as a transformational game, and it was shown that marketing it as such would raise conscious or unconscious defenses amongst players. (2012)
freedman2018updating
“On the other hand, the Embedded Design approach is less suitable for prosocial games that aim to provide factual information or model specific, readily transfer able sequences of action for players to enact outside of the game. For example, if the sole purpose of a game is to provide facts or statistics about a particular real - life issue or event, or to teach a specific behavior, a more direct, informational approach may be more suitable (though, as discussed above, these types of interventions run the risk of inadvertently activating descriptive norms for a prevalent social problem). Embedding may also be less viable (and less necessary) in domains that are not particularly sensitive or with intended audiences who are assumed to be inherently amenable to a game’s persuasive intent
In the end, Embedded Design approaches and more explicit approaches to crafting games for prosocial impact need not be viewed as opposing alternatives, but rather as potentially complementary and mutually reinforcing. In particular, as our own research has shown, games utilizing Embedded Design strategies may be especially effective at creating more open, expansive, and empathetic mindsets in players, one that makes them more likely to consider or accept the information contained in more direct or more obviously didactic interventions. Games that embed their prosocial aims and intent can thus be potentially powerful precursors to explicit games that share the same persuasive goals. Moreover, the two approaches are by no means mutually exclusive. As Figure 10 illustrates, the strategies suggested by the Embedded Design approach can be implemented within games that utilize a more direct, fact - based design format (e.g., trivia games presenting statistics or objective facts about a social issue or training modules that describe real life occurrences and model appropriate responses to them) to deliver persuasive content to players in a less over t or obvious fashion (i.e., in a fashion less likely to trigger psychological defenses or mindsets that reduce players’ receptivity of the game’s content or enjoyment of the play experience)“ (2015)
