Persuasiveness of a Game to Promote the Adoption of COVID-19 Precautionary Measures and the Moderating Effect of Gender

Abstract

Persuasive games are widely being implemented in the healthcare domain to drive behaviour change among individuals. Previous research has shown that there are differences in how males and females respond to persuasive attempts. However, there is little knowledge on whether gender moderates the effectiveness of persuasive games for health, specifically, games for promoting the adoption of COVID-19 precautionary measures. To address this gap, we designed COVID Pacman-R - a persuasive game to promote the adoption of COVID-19 precautionary measures. This paper presents the design and evaluation of COVID Pacman-R to examine its overall perceived persuasiveness as well as gender differences in persuasiveness to establish whether there is a need to tailor the game to various gender groups. Study results (N=131) revealed that the game is perceived as highly persuasive overall as well as by the different gender groups. The findings also revealed that there are no significant differences in the persuasiveness across gender groups with respect to COVID-19 ability to motivate them to adopt the precautionary measures.