Age and the persuasiveness of a game to promote the adoption of COVID-19 precautionary measures

Research has shown that there are differences in how various age groups respond to persuasive attempts. However, there is little knowledge on whether age influences the effectiveness of persuasive games for health, specifically, games for promoting the adoption of COVID-19 precautionary measures. To advance research in this area, we designed COVID Pacman-C - a persuasive game to promote the adoption of COVID-19 precautionary measures employing the competition strategy. This paper presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of COVID Pacman-C to examine its effectiveness with respect to the overall perceived persuasiveness as well as the effect of age on the persuasiveness to establish whether there is a need to tailor the game to various age groups. The results of the study (N=131) followed by a semi-structured interview of 18 participants reveals that the game is perceived as highly persuasive overall with respect to its ability to promote the adoption of the COVID-19 precautionary measures as well as by the different age groups. The findings also revealed that there are significant differences in the persuasiveness for people belonging to different age groups with respect to its ability to motivate them to adopt the COVID-19 precautionary measures.