Raising Awareness Through Games: The Influence of a Trolling Game on Perception of Toxic Behavior

2021-07-01
Komaç, Gökçe
Çağıltay, Kürşat
The use of video games for purposes other than entertainment has becomean appealing area of research. In recent years, games have become actors that supportsocial and political change by raising awareness, i.e., persuasive games. In this study,we focus on a persuasive game that portrays toxic online behaviors, often consideredas trolling: spamming, flaming, trash-talking, misdirection and using offensivelanguage. To observe the influence of a trolling game that we designed as a tool forraising awareness about toxic behavior, we applied a single-group pre-test and posttestdesign in a quantitative manner. We collected data via an online questionnaire(N = 111) to have a descriptive view at the results. Even though self-reports didnot show a change in awareness and knowledge acquisition by playing the game,participants had a more negative perception of toxic trolling after the gameplay. Allfive of the types of trolling were successfully represented in an immersion-neutralbut realistic setting. We aim to bring more insight into persuasive games literatureby discussing the implications of this study.

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Citation Formats
G. Komaç and K. Çağıltay, Raising Awareness Through Games: The Influence of a Trolling Game on Perception of Toxic Behavior. 2021, p. 156.