Gender and the Effectiveness of a Persuasive Game for Disease Awareness Targeted at the African Audience

Persuasive gamified systems have been effective at motivating behaviour change in various domains of life and for various user types. However, according to research, various user characteristics can impact the effectiveness of these systems. One of these user characteristics is user gender. In this paper, we examine the effectiveness of persuasive strategies implemented in a disease awareness persuasive game, titled “COVID Dodge”, for promoting COVID-19 awareness and safety precautions among the African audience and the moderating gender effects. In an in-the-wild study of 51 participants, we reveal that all the persuasive strategies implemented were highly effective overall and for each gender, with the Verifiability strategy being the most effective and the Reminders strategy as the least effective. We also uncovered that while all the persuasive strategies effectively motivated all genders, there was no significant difference in the effectiveness of any of the strategies across genders. We conclude with a discussion on implementing some persuasive strategies for African audiences.

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