Games for Change—A Comparative Systematic Review of Persuasive Strategies in Games for Behavior Change

Abstract

Games for change is a growing research field and studies have shown that these games can promote positive behaviour change using various persuasive strategies. This paper presents a systematic review of 130 persuasive games from the literature published in the last 21 years (2001-2021), to (1) highlight the current trends in the field with respect to domains, year, country, technology platforms, and genre (2) identify what strategies are employed in the games and their comparative analysis across domains; (3) uncover various ways the persuasive strategies are operationalized in games; (4) explore for possible relationships between persuasive games effectiveness and the number of strategies employed; (5) highlight gaps and opportunities for future research in the area of persuasive games. Our analysis reveals the Reward strategy is the most popular persuasive strategy employed in the persuasive games research. We also uncovered that, even though persuasive games have been strongly effective at promoting behaviour change, there was a significant negative relationship between the number of persuasive strategies employed in persuasive games and their overall effectiveness. Based on these findings, we provide insights and design suggestions, operationalization, and assessment for persuasive games.