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Towards Personality-driven Persuasive Health Games and Gamified Systems

Persuasive games and gamified systems are effective tools for motivating behavior change using various persuasive strategies. Research has shown that tailoring these systems can increase their efficacy. However, there is little knowledge on how game-based persuasive systems can be tailored to individuals of various personality traits. To advance research in this area, we conducted a large-scale study of 660 participants to investigate how different personalities respond to various persuasive strategies that are used in persuasive health games and gamified systems. Our results reveal that peoples personality traits play a significant role in the perceived persuasiveness of different strategies. Conscientious people tend to be motivated by goal setting, simulation, self-monitoring and feedback; people who are more open to experience are more likely to be demotivated by rewards, competition, comparison, and cooperation. We contribute to the CHI community by offering design guidelines for tailoring persuasive games and gamified designs to a particular group of personalities.

Why Are Persuasive Strategies Effective? Exploring the Strengths and Weaknesses of Socially-Oriented Persuasive Strategies

Socially-oriented persuasive strategies (competition, social comparison, and cooperation) which leverage the power of social influence have been widely employed in Persuasive Technologies (PTs) designs. However, there have been mixed findings regarding their effectiveness. There is still a dearth of knowledge on the mechanism through which these strategies could motivate or demotivate behaviors. To advance research in this area, we conduct a large-scale qualitative and quantitative study of 1768 participants to investigate the strengths and weaknesses of these strategies and their comparative effectiveness at motivating healthy behaviors. Our results reveal important strengths and weaknesses of individual strategies that could facilitate or hinder their effectiveness such as their tendency to simplify a behavior and make it fun, challenge people and make them accountable and their tendency to jeopardize individual’s privacy and relationships, creates unnecessary tension, and reduce self-confidence, respectively. The results, also show that there are significant differences between the strategies with respect to their persuasiveness overall with the social comparison being the most persuasive of the strategies. We contribute to the PT community by revealing the strengths and weaknesses of individual strategies that should be taken into account by designers when employing each of the strategies. Furthermore, we offer design guidelines for operationalizing the strategies to amplify their strengths and overcome their weaknesses.

Recommender Systems for Personalized Gamification

Gamification has been used in a variety of application domains to promote behaviour change. Nevertheless, the mechanisms behind it are still not fully understood. Recent empirical results have shown that personalized approaches can potentially achieve better results than generic approaches. However, we still lack a general framework for building personalized gameful applications. To address this gap, we present a novel general framework for personalized gameful applications using recommender systems (i.e., software tools and technologies to recommend suggestions to users that they might enjoy). This framework contributes to understanding and building effective persuasive and gameful applications by describing the different building blocks of a recommender system (users, items, and transactions) in a personalized gamification context.

Exploring the Links Between Persuasion, Personality and Mobility Types in Personalized Mobility Applications

Recent approaches on tackling the problem of sustainable transportation involve persuasive systems and applications. These systems focus on changing citizens’ behavior towards adopting transportation habits that rely more on the use of public transportation, bicycles and walking and less on private cars. A main drawback of existing applications is the limited use or lack of personalization aspects that consider differences in users’ susceptibility to persuasive strategies. In this paper, we explore two user traits that can be used for personalizing the persuasive strategies applied to end users: personality and mobility type. More specifically, we present the results of a study where we examined the perceived persuadability of eight persuasive strategies on users of five personality types and three mobility types.

Deconstructing Pokémon Go – An Empirical Study on Player Personality Characteristics

Pokemon Go can be considered a successful persuasive game to promote physical activity. This study provides an in-depth analysis of Pokemon Go players’ characteristics that relate to adoption and continued play of the game. Based on online studies at two different points in time (at the initial release and three months later) we analyzed differences in personality traits between players and non-players, as well as between players who continued playing the game and those who stopped playing. The results show that people who played the game score lower in “Conscientiousness” and higher in “Player Motivation” than non-players. Furthermore, people who continued playing the game three months later have a lower score in “Neuroticism” than those who stopped playing. Insights into player characteristics from our empirical analysis of Pokemon Go contribute to answering the key research question regarding to which personality characteristics the persuasive game experience should be personalized.

The Influence of Culture in the Effect of Age and Gender on Social Influence in Persuasive Technology

Research has shown that social influence can be used to effect behavior change. However, research on the role culture plays in the effect of age and gender on social influence in persuasive technology is scarce. To address this, we investigate the effect of age and gender on the susceptibility of individuals to Competition, Reward, Social Comparison and Social Learning in individualist and collectivist cultures, using a sample of 360 participants from North America, Africa and Asia. Our results reveal that there are more significant differences between males and females and between younger and older people in collectivist cultures than individualist cultures. In individualist culture, we found that males and females differ with respect to Competition only, with males being more susceptible. However, in collectivist culture, we found males differ from females with respect to Reward and Competition, with males being more susceptible, while younger people differ from older people with respect to Competition, Social Comparison and Social Learning, with younger people be more susceptible. Our findings provide designers of gamified persuasive applications with empirical insights for tailoring to the different cultures based on age and gender

The Influence of Personality on Mobile Web Credibility

Research has shown that the perceived credibility of a website is critical to its success. However, little is known about how individual differences influence this important factor of web design. In this paper, we investigate how personality traits affect the perceived credibility of a website in the mobile domain. Using a sample of 323 participants, we developed a model showing how the Big Five personality traits influence the perceived credibility of a website through its perceived aesthetics and perceived usability. Our model reveals that Agreeableness is the strongest predictor of aesthetics and/or usability, followed by Conscientiousness. This suggests that the more agreeable and/or the more conscientious users are easily more satisfied aesthetically and usability-wise by a mobile websites than the less agreeable and/or the less conscientious users respectively. Consequently, designers of mobile sites may have to do more in user interface design in order to attract the less agreeable and/or the less conscientious users to their sites based on its hedonic (aesthetics-inspired) and utilitarian (usability-inspired) appeal.

Towards a Trait Model of Video Game Preferences

ABSTRACT Typologies for understanding players’ preferences toward different gameplay styles have gained popularity in research. However, attempts to model players’ preferences are based on type models instead of trait models, contrary to the latest personality research. One such model, BrainHex, was designed as an interim model to enable investigations toward a definitive player trait model. However, it lacks empirical validation in support of its psychometric properties. The present work analyzed a dataset with over 50,000 respondents to devise a player traits model based off the BrainHex scale. Results indicate three player traits: action, esthetic, and goal orientation. Furthermore, we analyzed the games listed by participants as examples of what they enjoy, to understand which factors influence player preferences. Results illustrate that the emergent player traits and participants’ genders and attitudes toward story can partially explain player preferences toward certain games. Finally, we present the implications toward a definitive player traits model.