A Qualitative Study of Culture and Persuasion in a Smoking Cessation Game

To explore the issue of culture in persuasive technology, we identified strategies distinguishing individualist or collectivist audiences, and developed two versions of a prototype game. In this paper we report on a qualitative study of this game. The game concerned smoking cessation, and was set in a New Zealand context, where one version was designed for individualist New Zealand Europeans, and the other for collectivist New Zealand Māori. Our qualitative study involved people from each group playing each of the two games. Using a “think-aloud” protocol, we recorded player comments and reflections that show the effect of our design on their behaviour. The results of the study show the designs were interpreted differently according to the audiences playing them, and reveal detail about culture and persuasion.