Passengers' Safety in Aircraft Evacuations: Employing Serious Games to Educate and Persuade

The field of persuasive technology has only recently started to investigate how virtual experiences of risk can be used to change people’s attitudes and behaviors with respect to personal safety. In this paper, we aim at advancing the investigation in different directions. First, we extend the study to self-efficacy, which has been shown to be a predictor of future performance as well as an important factor for persuasion attempts which show negative consequences on people’s health. Second, we increase the interactivity of the virtual experience, by designing and implementing a full serious game, in which the user can acquire knowledge about several aspects of her personal safety, and we investigate also effects of the virtual experience on user’s knowledge. Third, we focus on an important problem to which serious games and persuasive technology have never been applied before, i.e. educating passengers about personal safety in aircraft evacuations. The experiment presented in the paper shows how just playing the serious game for a few minutes results in significant increases in user’s knowledge and self-efficacy.