Have you ever wondered how playing games can help us to train people, deal with societal challenges or raise awareness of contemporary social issues? In this MOOC you will learn the ins and outs of games that are designed with exactly those purposes in mind: serious games. We will define serious games and discuss the different types that have been developed. We will explain why people like to play them and what impact they may have. State of the art theories from game studies, philosophy and media psychology will be used to help you understand how serious games work and how they appeal to players. The potential impact of gaming is addressed in detail by discussing persuasive games, which aim at changing the player's attitude. Throughout the MOOC, theoretical insights will be illustrated with playful animations and case studies of serious games that are developed by world-class companies in the city of Rotterdam. This MOOC is particularly interesting for you when you are a student considering to study digital media such as serious games, a professional interested in the opportunities these games may create for your organization, or a game developer who wants to know more about the impact serious games can have. Are you ready to broaden your vision on serious games? Join this course and be inspired!
Three case studies
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来自 Erasmus University Rotterdam 的课程
Serious Gaming
178 个评分
从本节课中
Persuasive Gaming
How can a game influence the attitude of a player? In this module, we will dive into a specific kind of serious games: persuasive games. Rhetoric and psychological theories will help you to understand how the process of persuasion works. And we will analyze in practice how persuasive games can help us to feel empathy for poverty-stricken teenagers, what it feels like to have autism or understand the impact of gun violence.
与讲师见面
Jeroen JanszFull Professor
Media & Communication
Mijke SlotDr.
Media & Communication
[NOISE].
Welcome to our third lecture in this module on persuasive gaming.
Our previous lectures aimed at teaching you that serious games require
specific features to become persuasive.
We also argue that persuasion is a communicative process unfolding in the act
of play, combining the central and the peripheral persuasive roots.
Now we return to the features of persuasive games.
Their procedural rhetoric is concerned with rules,
enabling the player to experience the real world as you addressed in the game, for
example, being confronted with poverty.
One could argue that the rules are the backbone of the game.
But to understand how a game could persuade its players, we need more flesh
on the bones, that is, we need to study the game's other features.
Ruud Jacobs will present a model to analyze persuasive features and
apply this model to the cases of Poverty is not a Game.
Auti-Sim and The Best Amendment.
>> 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 and 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 even 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 the model's 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's cinematic features,
that is the player's perspective in the game.
For example, the difference between a first person perspective or
a birds eye view.
The game's procedural rhetoric is also a part of this level.
The third level context, focuses on how players experience the game.
So 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 invoke 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 the 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 game's features and how these are experienced in play.
The model aims to be comprehensive,
highlighting the different ways a game can attempt to persuade players.
In practice, games employ several methods simultaneously.
To show you how this works, I will analyze the most important
features of three persuasive games using the la Hera's model.
Poverty is not a game, in short, PING is our first game to discuss.
PING is a 3D role-playing game about individual poverty.
Wherein 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 PING's backstory is communicated only in text.
Visual persuasion is interesting in PING.
The game's message is definitely not communicative
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 messages forcefully communicated at the sign level by using sounds and
visual effects to control what players do by blurring the screen and
using overly loud noise.
These effects show the character's internal state.
At the system level, its 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 overstimulation or
seeking out 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 players 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 shoots
are black cones and the games music consist of frantic banjo riffs.
Procedural persuasion is well developed showing that acting violently
only makes 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 PING's emphasis on narrative persuasion
is close to traditional persuasion much like a documentary.
AUTI-SIM's mimicking of the autism experience is procedural
rhetoric at its purest, even leaving out goals and other really game-like elements.
The Best Amendment then acts as a sort of warning.
That it's easy to make players 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.
