Investigating Avatar Customization as a Motivational Design Strategy for Improving Engagement with Technology-Enabled Services for Health

Technology-enabled services for physical and mental health are a promising approach to improve healthcare globally. Unfortunately, the largest barrier for effective technology-based treatment is participants' gradually fading engagement with effective novel training applications, such as exercise apps or online mental health training programs. Engaging users through design presents an elegant solution to the problem; however, research on technology-enabled services is primarily focused on the efficacy of novel interventions and not on improving adherence through engaging interaction design. As a result, motivational design strategies to improve engagement---both in the moment of use and over time---are underutilized. Drawing from game-design, I investigate avatar customization as a game-based motivational design strategy in four studies. In Study 1, I examine the effect of avatar customization on experience and behaviour in an infinite runner game. In Study 2, I induce different levels of motivation to research the effects of financial rewards on self-reported motivation and performance in a gamified training task over 11 days. In Study 3, I apply avatar customization to investigate the effects of attrition in an intervention context using a breathing exercise over three weeks. In Study 4, I investigate the immediate effects of avatar customization on the efficacy of an anxiety reducing attentional retraining task. My results show that avatar customization increases motivation over time and in the moment of use, suggesting that avatar customization is a viable strategy to address the engagement barrier that thwarts the efficacy of technology-enabled services for health

Understanding the Influence of Power and Perspective-Taking on Collaborative Decision-Making

Public engagement in collaborative natural resource management necessitates perspective taking, shared understanding, and collaboration. There is currently little understanding about how to reliably generate perspective-taking and collaboration, particularly in situations involving the unequal distribution of resources. Here we examine how using a computer-mediated scenario to simulate resource gain and loss influenced individual perspective-taking and behavior. Participants (n=180) were randomly assigned to each condition: high resources, low resources, lose resources, gain resources. Multilevel analysis revealed that losing resources decreased perspective-taking and collaboration. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of this research for public engagement in environmental decisions

Systems at Play: The Construction of International Systems in Social Impact Games

This thesis explores how game makers conceive of and navigate the intersection between digital systems and real world systems by asking, how can social impact game designers shape procedural rhetoric to effectively address complex real world systems with digital systems? By examining three game case studies, I reach four significant findings regarding player agency, subversive play, design approaches to scale, and game difficulty in regards to systems fluency

Video Games, Influence, and Identification: The Perpetuation of Culture Through Digital Worlds

Video games, through their widespread popularity and appeal, transmit meaningful ideas, beliefs, and attitudes via the use of digital worlds, narratives, characters, and play. Play has always held a key role in human life, but the video game medium accentuates and accelerates the reach and impact of play on human users. Jacques Ellul’s philosophy of social propaganda and Kenneth Burke’s rhetorical theory each offer important implications to the persuasiveness of video games; however, when placed in conversation with one another, the union of Ellul and Burke leads to a more complete understanding of how video games have such an effect and what can be done when complications are found. That video games are influential is not troubling, but it is worth exploring the ways in which video games are changing players’ actions, attitudes, and ideals through covert persuasion. Video games have the capacity and potency to transmit and instill prejudicial attitudes in players through covert persuasion, and these attitudes can lead to destructive actions. Many groups suffer from stereotypical depictions in video games, but one particular group under threat from the video game industry in the current political climate of the United States are Hispanic and Latino populations and cultures. If video games have the power to spread prejudice, then they also have the power to correct those problematic attitudes

Using social and behavioural science to support COVID-19 pandemic response

The COVID-19 pandemic represents a massive global health crisis. Because the crisis requires large-scale behaviour change and places significant psychological burdens on individuals, insights from the social and behavioural sciences can be used to help align human behavior with the recommendations of epidemiologists and public health experts. Here we review experimental and correlational data from a selection of research topics relevant to pandemics, including work on navigating threats, social and cultural influences on behaviour, science communication, moral decision-making, leadership, and stress and coping. In each section, we note the nature and quality of prior research, including uncertainty and unsettled issues. We identify several insights for effective response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and also highlight important gaps researchers should move quickly to fill in the coming weeks and months

Video Design and Interactivity: The Semiotics of Multimedia in Instructional Design

This creation-as-research thesis examines the semiotics of multimedia and interactivity within the context of instruction, focusing on theoretical and practical representations in video game design, and the cultural models therein. There are 4 parts to this thesis 1) A traditional written document; 2) A 15-Module Online Course in video game design entitled Gaming, Interactive, and Multiplatform Media; 3) 15 Summary Videos of the online course in video game design; 4) The performative creation-as-research dissertation presentation. This thesis highlights the teaching practices surrounding video game design principles, while emulating those design principles as part of the instructional platforms. The 4 parts of this thesis, collectively, are a manifestation of the findings in the written component, which suggests that video games, through their innate interactivity via the inclusion of multimedia as part of their design, hold critical implementation frameworks for course-based instructional design, when multimedia is used as part of the instructional process

Using social and behavioural science to support COVID-19 pandemic response

The COVID-19 pandemic represents a massive global health crisis. Because the crisis requires large-scale behaviour change and places significant psychological burdens on individuals, insights from the social and behavioural sciences can be used to help align human behavior with the recommendations of epidemiologists and public health experts. Here we discuss evidence from a selection of research topics relevant to pandemics, including work on navigating threats, social and cultural influences on behaviour, science communication, moral decision-making, leadership, and stress and coping. In each section, we note the nature and quality of prior research, including uncertainty and unsettled issues. We identify several insights for effective response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and also highlight important gaps researchers should move quickly to fill in the coming weeks and months

National council of provinces rhetoric in overseeing the implementation of South Africa's national development plan

This thesis is about analysing the political rhetoric of the National Council of Provinces (NCOP), in overseeing the implementation of South Africa's National Development Plan (NDP).1 The study seeks to define the underlying reasons which, compound slow policy implementation, particularly as exacerbated by weakened and misaligned policy oversight debates in the NCOP. This study is particularly important because the NDP is the long-term vision and development plan of the governing African National Congress's vision 2030. Findings from the National Planning Commission's Diagnostic Report which, was released in June 2011, indicated that “a failure to implement policies and an absence of broad partnerships have been identified as some of the main reasons for the slow progress in implementing the country's transformation policies.” 2 In addition to these prevailing conditions, “it is also imperative to note that South Africa had found itself in the middle of a technical recession and had still been grappling with the impact and aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis, at the time when the NDP was adopted in 2012. 3 ” “The global financial crisis had a dire impact on the South African labour market, resulting in the shedding of almost 1 million jobs over 2009 and 2010, reflecting longer term structural problems.”4 The NDP was hence developed in part, to address the impact of the 2008 global financial crisis, alongside growing and prevailing social and economic challenges in South Africa. Inherited inequalities had been exacerbated, in part by the fact that Parliament and particularly the NCOP, had not been able to adequately give full effect to its three sphere oversight role as underpinned by its cooperative governance and intergovernmental relations constitutional mandate. Consequently, this has led to an inability to meaningfully oversee and accelerate the implementation of South Africa's transformation policies. The study will place strategic focus on how the quality of arguments communicated in the NDP could either catalyse or impede the oversight and accountability work of the NCOP, thereby inadvertently decelerating the implementation of the NDP. The study also provides an overarching perspective of South Africa's broader rhetorical situation, which manifest as exogenous shocks within the NCOP's operating environment. The overarching rhetorical situation is also postulated as one of the key determinants, impacting how the NCOP approaches and shapes its policy debates. Specific emphasis will also be placed on the National Council of Provinces (NCOP) in the fifth parliament (particularly the 2015 appropriations budget vote process) and how the second chamber of Parliament has for purposes of executing its constitutional mandate of three sphere oversight and accountability, interpreted, synthesized, and as a result executed its oversight functions, based on the rhetoric of the NDP in relation to the outcomes in the NDP that focus on the economy, employment, and the NDP's commitment to building a capable developmental state. This study is of great importance and is necessitated by the imperative to ensure that the NCOP matures in its role as construct of South Africa's constitutional democracy, which is tasked with the important responsibility of undertaking three-sphere oversight to oversee the implementation of key development policy constructs and development catalysing legislation, as guided by the NDP

Technology argument frames : examining the impact of argumentation on the development of a health information exchange initiative

This dissertation applies the Technology Frames of Reference (TFR) theoretical lens to examine the implementation of a health information exchange (HIE) initiative in southeast USA. It extends the TFR lens by developing Toulminian argument maps to depict frame structure and employing the argument theories of Toulmin, Habermas and Perelman Olbrechts-Tyteca to help analyze the role that argumentation plays in the emergence and development of the technology frames that characterized this HIE endeavor. The argument maps developed in this dissertation helped to assess the level of argumentation within frames and to compare argumentation across frame domains. The argument maps were also used to structurally depict changes in frame salience over time and helped to facilitate the discovery of a prominent “perspective blindness” or “perspective indifference” which was the key finding of this dissertation. Previous TFR literature has focused on dysfunctions produced by conflict/alignment issues. This dissertation extends this research by highlighting the role that conflict avoidance or frame apathy may play in producing these dysfunctions. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s New Rhetoric was recommended as a boundary spanning discursive framework that could help ameliorate the problems associated with both inter-frame conflict and frame indifference