How (not) to increase older adults’ tendency to anthropomorphise in serious games

Barbara C N Müller, Shengnan Chen, Sari R R Nijssen and Simone Kühn

PLOS ONE, 2018, vol. 13, issue 7, 1-14

Abstract: Among elderly, the use of serious games steadily increases. Research shows that anthropomorphising digital agents (i.e., ascribing human characteristics to them) has positive short-term consequences on interactions with digital agents. However, whether these effects can also be observed over a long-term period and in a real-life setting is unknown. In two studies, we investigated the important long-term consequences of anthropomorphism among older adults (age > 50) to increase involvement in serious games. Participants read either a story that highly anthropomorphized the digital agent of a training game, or a low anthropomorphism story about that agent. To investigate long-term effect, they played the training game for three weeks, and gaming data was assessed (number of games played, time of playing, points gained). While on the short-term, the anthropomorphic story increased the humanness of the agent (Study 1), no long-term effects where found (Study 2). Furthermore, an anthropomorphic story had no influence on the gaming outcome. Our results inform app developers about which techniques are useful to humanise digital agents.

Date: 2018
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0199948 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 99948&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0199948

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0199948

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().