Coulton, Paul (2015) The role of game design in addressing behavioural change. In: Proceedings for 11th European Academy of Design Conference :. UNSPECIFIED, FRA.
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Abstract
With the increasing promotion of design for behavioural change as a means of addressing the complex societal and environmental challenges the world currently faces, comes the associated challenge of developing appropriate design techniques to achieve such change. Whilst many designers have sought inspiration from game design they have often drawn from the techniques associated with ‘gamification’ which has been heavily criticised as manipulative and only capable of addressing simplistic extrinsic personal motivations. In this paper I discuss an alternative perspective whereby games are considered a rhetorical medium through which players can rehearse plausible alternate presents or speculative futures. The consideration of games in this way is effectively extending the view that ‘all design is rhetoric’ to include interactive systems and in this paper I highlight how by adopting such a perspective enables designers to tackle complex issues without resorting to reductionist approaches.