2010/11/04 by Wei Peng, Mira Lee, Mi-Ra Lee +1 · 6 citations
Arts and Humanities · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Media Influence and Health #Educational Games and Gamification #Digital Games and Media
paper · doi:10.1111/j.1460-2466.2010.01511.x
Serious games are emerging as a new medium for social change. This study investigated the influence of presentation mode afforded by different media on willingness to help in the context of humanitarianaid. Two online experiments were conducted. Thefirst experiment demonstrated that playing the Darfur is Dying game elicited greater role-taking and resulted in greater willingness to help the Darfurian people than reading a text conveying thesameinformation.Thesecondexperimentdeconstructedthevariablepresentationmode in more detail by adding a game watching condition. Similar results were found such that game playing resulted in greater role-taking and willingness to help than game watching and text reading. Implications for researchers and game developers are also discussed.