A systematic literature review on the use of games for attitude change

Abstract

Governments are increasingly using games for civic engagement, decision making, and education. Serious gaming is a type of game that has often been advocated as a means for changing the attitude of its players and can be used for changing the attitude of civil servants. However, the relationship between games and attitude change in civil servants remains unexplored. This paper aims at identifying factors leading to attitude change of civil servants. As hardly any paper is focused on civil servants' attitude change through games, the authors broaden their research to attitude change through games in general. Out of 483 documents, 19 reference papers were analyzed in detail. Eighty-one games were found, and more than 13 different theories were identified containing 30 different influencing factors, which were found mostly to be unrelated and context-dependent. The conceptual dispersion between studies indicates that the resulting overview of factors is a first step towards creating a uniform theory. The results can help governments to design better games.