The motivational appeal of persuasive strategies in a healthy eating behaviour change game

Abstract

Persuasive game designers employ persuasive strategies to improve the effectiveness of behaviour change games. Since persuasive strategies are intended to motivate the players toward the desired behaviours, the motivational appeal of these persuasive strategies can play an important role in the effectiveness of these behaviour change games. Therefore, it is important to understand the effectiveness of persuasive strategies and their motivational appeal. To advance research in this direction, this paper explores the relationship between the effectiveness of four popular persuasive strategies (reward, competition, praise, suggestion) and their motivational appeal in a persuasive game for healthy eating. In a study of 124 participants, our results showed that all the persuasive strategies were perceived to be effective in promoting behaviour change. We also discovered that the reward, competition and suggestion strategies showed a completely consistent relationship with all the motivational appeal dimensions. We also observed the strongest motivational appeal dimension for rewards was attention, competition and praise predominantly impacted satisfaction, while relevance stood out as the most significant motivational appeal dimension for suggestions. We conclude by offering some insights on how to implement persuasive strategies that amplify the four motivational appeal dimensions, in order to design games with better persuasive appeal.