When we first investigated the goal was to understand if games offer non-profits a new tool to use when packaging and delivering their message. Thus we consulted existing literature on information processing in order to help us analyse the way that messages are processed, as well as the impact that the message delivery mechanism has on the experience of the message recipient. Our research has to lead us to the conclusion that gamification has the potential to mitigate the influence that both task-related and incidental effect (Garg, Inman, Mittal, 2013) has on decision-making, and thus enable the player to make a more organic, and thoroughly reasoned decision with regards to behaviour. Though games are perhaps not entirely unique in this capacity, there are few other constructs that offer the same benefits.
Task-related effect, which stems from factors embedded greek mobile numbers in the decision itself (Garg et al., 2013), can be mitigated through gamification in several ways. For example, task-related effect can arise when the decider is faced with more information than s/he can comfortably process; in these situations, the structure of games can be used to teach the decider relevant information in a non-threatening and gradual way. Thus, when it comes time to make the decision, the decider can retrieve the necessary information with relative ease (Tybout, Sternthal, Malaviya, Bakamitsos, Park, 2005), which might lessen both the anxiety associated with feeling uninformed and the required cognitive effort.
If the decider is struggling with an emotionally-laden decision, a game can help him/her think through potential outcomes, and generate approximations of likely outcomes, depending on the choices made. Though designed with other objectives in mind, Spent exemplifies this type of gameplay, and it is easy to imagine how a non-profit with a mission involving helping people make “better” decisions might design a similar game in order to counteract the task-related effect that is inevitably part of certain life choices.