Exploring the impact of game framing on the motivational appeal of persuasive strategies and their effectiveness in behaviour change games

To enhance the persuasiveness of behaviour-change games, designers employ persuasive strategies. These persuasive strategies are intended to motivate the users towards the desired behaviours. Hence, the motivational appeal of these persuasive strategies can play an important role in the effectiveness of these behaviour-change games. Furthermore, research has shown that game framing can impact its effectiveness. Therefore, it is important to understand how the type of framing employed in the game impacts the effectiveness of persuasive strategies and their motivational appeal. To advance research in this direction, this paper explores the relationship between the perceived effectiveness of four popular persuasive strategies (reward, competition, praise and suggestion) and their motivational appeal in a persuasive game for healthy eating across the three different game framings: gain-framing, loss-framing or gain-loss-framing. In a study of 371 participants, our results revealed that all the persuasive strategies were perceived to be significantly effective across all game-framing versions. We also discovered that game framing had varying significant impacts on the relationship between the perceived effectiveness of persuasive strategies and their motivational appeal. We conclude by offering some insights on how to implement persuasive strategies to design games with better persuasive motivational appeal.