Study Shows Game Design Can Reduce Stereotypes, Social Biases
News
HCII Assistant Professor Geoff Kaufman, who joined the department this semester from Dartmouth's Tiltfactor Lab, is making headlines for a study that demonstrates how games can have a positive impact on society. The research, "A Psychologically 'Embedded' Approach to Designing Games for Prosocial Causes," was conducted while Kaufman was a post-doctoral researcher at Dartmouth and resulted from collaboration with co-author Mary Flanagan, Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities at Dartmouth and founding director of Tiltfactor. The study was published today in Cyberpsychology: Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace.
While critics bemoan the perceived negative aspects of games, the study uses a new research approach — embedded game design — to demonstrate how games can change players’ biases, reduce social stereotypes and prejudice, and engender a more complex view of diversity. Through embedded game design, an intended persuasive message is incorporated into the game’s content, mechanics or context of play. For the study, two embedded design strategies were tested: intermixing, which combines on-topic and off-topic game content to make the themes less apparent; and obfuscating, which uses game genres or framing devices to redirect players’ focus from the true objectives of the game.
"Designers of social impact interventions, including games, must be mindful of people’s natural psychological resistance to any activity they perceive is attempting to alter the way they think or feel about an issue," Kaufman said. "This may be particularly true in the design of persuasive games, which, to be effective, should ideally be intrinsically engaging and re-playable experiences that people will return to again and again."
The researchers used two card games created at Tiltfactor to test the effectiveness of their embedded design strategies. In the end, they found that both games strengthened assertive responses to multiple forms of social bias, promoted broader and more inclusive perceptions of social groups, and raised players’ concerns about their own potential biases, as compared to versions of the games that didn't use the embedded design techniques and baseline scores observed in no-game comparison conditions.
Read more about the research in Dartmouth's press release.