This week has been quite heavy in theory, so far you've learned that serious games require specific features to become persuasive. We've also argue that persuasion is a communicative process unfolding in the act of play. Again, can teach something by providing direct information about something, the central route of persuasion, or persuade you to change your behavior by adding emotional music, or attractive, or relatable characters the peripheral route of persuasion. Now we returned to the features of persuasive games. They're procedural rhetoric is concerned with rules enabling the player to experience real-world issues addressed in the game. One could argue that the rules are the backbone of the game, but to understand the nuances of how a game can persuade its players better we will provide you with three different cases this week. Our former colleague Ruud Jacobs currently working at University of Twente wrote his PhD about persuasive games and knows all about this topic. He'll present a model to analyze persuasive features and apply this model to 3K studies, a game about poverty, a game about autism, and a game about gun control. I'm sure these cases will help you to understand the theory better. As you start playing a persuasive game in your browser, you will immediately experience how the designer decided to present the game's content. You'll see graphics, hear music, and read pieces of text. While playing you are generally drawn into a story. Graphics, music, text and story are a few examples of game features but there are more. The range of persuasive game features is rich and can be analyzed at different levels. Therefore, we need a model to grasp the feature's complexity. In our Persuasive Gaming in Context Project, we employ Teresa de la Hera's conceptual model of persuasive dimensions. The model distinguishes persuasive features across three levels, signs, systems, and contexts. The level of signs at the inner ring covers the visual, linguistic, auditory, and tactile stimuli. Incorporating all of the information that reaches the players across the sensory modalities of seeing, hearing, and touching. On the system level, persuasive strategies establish meaningful ties between the signs and are divided into narrative, cinematic, and procedural persuasion into models middle ring. These dimensions cover the way a game's interplay of signs and structure can create a persuasive argument based on the story of the game. Persuasion might also be used in the game cinematic features, that is the player's perspective in the game. For example, the difference between a first-person perspective or a bird's-eye view. The game's procedural rhetoric is also part of this level. The third level, context, focuses on how players experience the game. This level of persuasion occurs when the game is actually played. Social persuasion describes to what extent players are triggered to play with others or to talk to others. Affective persuasion is concerned with the emotions a game may evoke in players, for example when they identify with a character. Sensorial persuasion is about the sensory experience the game aims to trigger in players. Tactical persuasion, finally, is related to the game's challenges. When players need to invest more effort in completing the game, we may assume that this goes hand in hand with a focus on the game's message. The differentiation between the levels of sign, system, and context underlines the holistic nature of the model as it represents both the games features and how these are experienced in playing. The model aims to be comprehensive, highlighting the different ways a game can attempt to persuade players. In practice games employs several methods simultaneously. To show you how this works, I will analyze the most important features of three persuasive games using de la Hera's model. Poverty Is Not a Game in short ping is our first case to discuss. Ping is a 3D role-playing game about individual poverty, where in players guide a poverty-stricken teen boy or girl through the process of finding a job, a house, and getting education. At the level of sign and system, linguistic and narrative persuasion are prominent which is understandable because pings backstory is communicated only in text. Visual persuasion is interesting in ping, the game is message is definitely not communicated through how the characters look. They are cool kids, not looking tired, grimy, or even unhappy while the game is being played. The second case is Auti-Sim, the game aims to give players a sense of what autism feels like. The message is forcefully communicated at the sign level by using sounds and visual effects to control what players do by blowing the screen and using overly loud noise. These effects show the character's internal state. At the system level is procedural persuasion amounts to keeping players from approaching other people in the game. In this way, the game makes players act like an autistic child might in an overcrowded playground. Either feeling very uncomfortable from the over stimulation or seeking are quiet areas free from others. The Best Amendment is concerned with gun violence in the United States. At the sign level linguistic persuasion is used by interspersing combat scenes with quote from program activists in the National Rifle Association. Visually and orally The Best Amendment seems to be designed for shock value. Characters bleed after being shot for instance. The player's character is a conical white figure invoking images of Ku Klux Klan robes, this racist connotation is actually made explicit as the enemies the player a shoots are black cones and the games music consists of frantic banjo riffs. Procedural persuasion is well-developed, showing that acting violently only make situations worse. However, by making the behavior that they want players to reflect on so engaging and so much fun this game's message might go over people's heads. Comparing our three cases, we see that pings emphasis on narrative persuasion is close to traditional persuasion much like a documentary. Autism's mimicking of the autism experience is procedural rhetoric at its purest, even leaving our goals and other really game-like elements. The best amendment then acts as a warning that it's easy to make player's miss the message if you do not balance out presentation and procedural rhetoric. Of course, in this case this is mostly because the creator intended the game to be satire. With this lecture, we completed the module in which we explained and illustrated how persuasive games could fulfill their function. In the next module, we discuss the complex issue of the game's impact.
