The Impact of Persuasive Framing on the Perceived Effectiveness of a Game for Behaviour Change

Persuasive games have emerged as effective tools for behaviour change across diverse life domains, engaging and motivating players towards positive behaviours. An essential factor that may influence the effectiveness of persuasive games is their framing, which refers to the strategic design and presentation of the game's context, mechanics, and objectives. This paper investigates the role of game framing in enhancing the perceived effectiveness of persuasive games or not, using the context of a healthy eating game with three different game framing versions (gain-framing, loss-framing and gain-loss framing). In a study of 371 participants, our results show that while all the framing types were effective at promoting behaviour change, gain-framing was perceived as significantly less effective when compared to loss-framing and gain-loss framing. We also explore potential differences in the perceived effectiveness of four persuasive strategies (reward, competition, praise, and suggestion) implementations across the three framing types. We concluded by exploring the reasons behind these results and their implications for designing persuasive games for various framing types.