Non-branching Interactive Comics

Abstract

As behavior change interventions increasingly use game and gamelike strategies to influence behavior, it seems pressing to develop a specific framework that reconsiders game design practices in a way to include the issue of persuasive effectiveness. This paper presents an overview of current discussion regarding persuasion through games and proposes the category of "game systems" to include different kinds of persuasive strategies that employ gaming such as persuasive games, gamification and gameful design, in order to facilitate the development of design tools that are goal-specific towards behavior change. Current tools focus on game usability or playability, but very few offer usable heuristics for the evaluation of persuasive efficacy. The following pages propose an initial differentiation between persuasive game systems that act as computer-mediated communication and others that instead behave as computer human interaction, to highlight the necessity for different design strategies. © Springer International Publishing 2013.