Meaningful negative experiences within games for social change. Designing and analysing games as persuasive communication systems

Does a game for social change contribute to move the social issue it covers forward? And the player’s understanding of it? Does it represent a clear/unique perspective? Does it transfer the expected meaning? Is it likely to impact on player’s attitudes? But also: What makes a game for social change good in communicating meaning? Does it really work? These are some of the questions that set in motion this research as an in-depth through-design enquiry on games addressing significant subjects of matters as wicked problems or social issues. Games for social change serve communitarian interests raising awareness, installing new social relations and triggering social improvements. They provide players with the opportunity to safely challenge themselves, explore civic, social, political, moral or ethical issues, encouraging an alteration of entrenched attitudes and sometimes even behaviours. As a consequence, when game design encounters and answers to social and civic purposes, designers have to go over and above the promotion of pure entertainment. This study extensively approaches and critiques the existent interdisciplinary literature, including practical and analytical experimentations. Digging into elements and mechanisms to strengthen the experience of players, it introduces the concept of meaningful negative experience. The role of these experiences steamed from the encounter of negative feelings and failure during the game is investigated focusing on how designers can conscientiously include them as triggers that push players to acquire new meanings and reframe their knowledge. Hence, exploring the potential for games to promote and instil prosocial attitudes, it pushes the issue further. It proposes a practical mix of quantitative and qualitative tools to enquire if and to what extent the game responds the designer’ expectations in terms of experience generated and meaning transferred. In so doing, it is acknowledged and answered the spread need of strategies and tools to assess and verify the effectiveness of these games.The result is a framework that provides a tripartite contribution: (1) a set of theoretical concepts to conscientiously design games for social change; (2) a set of practical, functional enquiry tools to enable designers/researchers to better comprehend and assess these games effectiveness; (3) a design model largely based on the iterative design process that includes the previous contributions. A central aspect of this research is its methodology that lies on the iterative process itself: its concepts, tools and methods, and the model itself have been developed and validated across the design and evaluation of a significant number of games as case studies.