Event Title

FSA10 - Illuminating Serious Games through Procedural Rhetoric: Re-Mission

Presenter Information

Emily Johnson, University of Central Florida
Rudy McDaniel, University of Central FloridaFollow

Location

PSY-226

Streaming Media

Start Date

3-11-2017 3:30 PM

Description

The PC videogame Re-Mission was created by HopeLab (2004), the health-focused R&D organization of The Omidyar Group (HopeLab, 2017). This game was designed specifically to help children being treated for cancer better understand their conditions, to simulate common cancer treatments (and the effects of forgoing certain treatments), and to persuade them to adhere to their prescriptions. HopeLab conducted an extensive controlled study including 375 male and female patients 13-29 years old in 34 medical centers in 3 countries between 2004 and 2005 (Kato et al., 2008). Players in the control group were encouraged to play a similarly-styled commercial game, Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb. The results suggest that Re-Mission greatly influenced patient behavior. Specifically, the 54 patients who played the game and were also prescribed a specific oral medication had a significantly higher level of that medicine in their blood samples than the control group, suggesting that the patients who played Re-Mission took their medicine more regularly. These results even applied to patients who played for a total of less than 6 hours over the course of the three-month study. These results are impressive, but we contend that such a game designed with the explicit purpose of modifying behavior, especially if the game is intended to be played by a vulnerable population, warrants a closer look from a humanities perspective. Using Ian Bogost's (2007) method of procedural rhetoric, a method that inspects the structure (mechanics) of a game as tools meant to persuade the player. Some game mechanics reward certain player behavior, some punish specific actions, and some are neutral; however, Bogost argues that the collective of the game's mechanics acts as a persuasive argument. Using this method, we mapped out the mechanics of key interactions in Re-Mission's 20 levels. This allows for transparent analysis of the game's procedural rhetoric, the argument the game makes, and the values it reinforces. Our analysis suggests that Re-Mission player actions can be categorized into three types: encouraged medical actions, encouraged nonmedical actions, discouraged actions (medical and nonmedical). In our roundtable discussion, we will give a brief overview of this process along with a description of the game, and we will invite the audience to participate in a discussion of our recommendation that future designers of serious games for patient education and other persuasive endeavors analyze their mechanics for procedural rhetoric in a similar manner before finalizing the game design. References Bogost, I. (2007). Persuasive games: The expressive power of videogames. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. HopeLab, TRI, Realtime Associates. (2004). Re-Mission (videogame). Palo Alto, CA: HopeLab. http://www.re-mission.net HopeLab. (2017). About. Retrieved from http://www.hopelab.org/about/ Kato, Pamela M., et al. (2008). A video game improves behavioral outcomes in adolescents and young adults with cancer: A randomized trial. Pediatrics, 122(2) pp. e305-e317. http://www.hopelab.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Pediatrics_ReMission.pdf