DESIGNING ADVERGAMES FOR AWARENESS CAMPAIGNS: AN ENGAGING TOOL

Abstract

Awareness campaigns lack the interactivity and engagement factors, especially when the target audience are children. Gaming provides an engagement tool that may help change attitudes, behaviors and ideas of the audience. “Advergames” could be used to integrate information and awareness messages in a more engaging and effective manner. The originality of this research is that, to the best of the researcher knowledge, this is the first time that advergame is used in an awareness campaign in Egypt. As suggested, this research addresses the bullying among children issue by showing all kinds of bullying and how to face them in different situations. The importance of the paper is to state the steps, stages, and suggested design for the awareness advergame. The goal of this paper is the suggestion of creating an advergame as part of an awareness campaign to engage children and make them aware of a serious social issue. According to the research framework that was derived from the social cognitive theory by Albert Bandura 1986,and Vanissa Wanick’s four layers. The effectiveness of the advergame in achieving the campaign objectives is tested using two questionnaires: the first was addressed to experts in different fields, and the second was distributed among Egyptian primary students. The results indicate that an advergame can be applied in awareness campaigns according to the suggested framework, taking in consideration that player prefers to play with members of the same gender and that there has been a little variation in preferring of a game character according to age variation.

Keywords

• advergames; awareness campaigns; engagement; gaming; virtual reality