Investigating the Role of Adaptivity in Video Games for Attitude Change

This paper proposes and plans an empirical test of whether video games can change players' attitudes more effectively when their persuasive content is adapted to each player's initial attitudes. Its central premise is that credibility bias and motivated reasoning cause players who hold negative views toward a topic to discount persuasive messages, and that tuning down persuasive content for such players, while presenting it at full strength to those already favorable, may reduce that resistance. The authors frame this as a research gap, noting that prior adaptive game work has adjusted difficulty or personality-based persuasion strategies but not initial attitudes, and they position the study within the APE dual-process model of explicit and implicit attitudes.

The authors built a delivery-management simulator on the topic of electromobility, with adaptive elements including in-game goals, narrative messages from a dealership mechanic, and user-interface highlights of savings and emissions data, each delivered at low, mid, or maximum persuasive intensity. Three hypotheses are stated: adaptive content will produce greater explicit attitude change, particularly among initially negative players; static content will produce greater implicit change; and the adaptive version will be more enjoyable. The planned pretest-posttest study uses 64 university students per group, measuring explicit attitudes through Likert and semantic differential scales, implicit attitudes through the Implicit Association Test, and enjoyment through the Game User Experience Satisfaction Scale, with analysis by two-sample t-tests and regression. The study is a proposal, so no results are reported, and its scope is limited to a single Czech student population and one topic.