Designing Analytic Serious Games: An Expert Affordance View on Privacy Decision-Making

Abstract

With advancing digitalisation and the associated ubiquitous data processing, people face frequent privacy decisions. As personal data is often collected and processed in non-transparent ways, decision-making is tedious and regularly results in unthoughtful choices that resign privacy to comfort. Serious Games (SG) could be instrumentalised to raise awareness about privacy concerns and investigate how better privacy decisions can be encouraged. However, creating a SG that can research and promote better privacy choices while providing exciting gameplay requires carefully balanced game design. In this study, we interviewed 20 international experts in privacy, psychology, education, game studies, and interaction design to elicit design suggestions for analytic Serious Games that can be applied to research and improve privacy decision-making. With a mixed-method approach, we conducted a qualitative affordance analysis and quantified the findings to determine each expert groups’ perceptions of how to investigate and educate privacy decision-making with games while keeping an engaging experience for players. The findings suggest that privacy decision-making is best analysed by storytelling that extends to a real-world context and engages the player with curiosity. Decision-making investigation is suggested to either apply unobtrusive in-game monitoring with story-aligned character interrogation, switching to a meta-context or include personal data and devices from daily routines. Conclusively, design implications for analytic SG targeting privacy are synthesised from the experts’ suggestions.