Persuasive gaming tool for changing children’s attitude towards food waste

Abstract

Context. Food wastage has seen a significant rise since the 20th century. It has been recorded that over 50% of the waste from households is food waste. This thesis considers children to have a main role in this issue. Statistics show that households having young children produce 15% more food waste.

Goal. The goal of this thesis is to investigate the reasons why children waste food and how a persuasive gaming tool can be made to change children’s attitudes. Our objective is to make a persuasive gaming tool that can teach children and their parents about food waste.

Method. Several studies and research have been performed to highlight different reasons behind this issue. Reasons like time-limit pressure, over-purchasing of food in emotions and affiliation by parents, and children not being able to understand their hunger levels, have been the most important among the discussed in the literature review. Following the literature review of the food wastage reasons, we check various games that have been developed to counter the food wastage behavior among children. Games like Feed the Movement, help children understand how to carry out day-to-day activities with parents while keeping minimum food prints, game-on and Tony-Waste help children understand how to manage the kitchen and run restaurants without wasting food whereas Upcycle game teaches children how to be creative in creating recyclable recipes from leftovers, and food waste board game teaches children to be mindful of their decisions in terms of food consumption, storage, and wastage. In addition, Face-the-waste Game provocates children to make them realize how bad it is to waste food when they see the food going into the bin upon answering incorrectly. Exploring the different games developed in this arena gave an idea of what persuasive design principles applied to them. While analyzing the gaps in the games developed, we identify that they lack the element of learning and are also not helping children understand their hunger/fullness cues. As discussed already, one of the important reasons for food wastage among children is the unawareness of their hunger cues, therefore we consider that gap in our game design. With the gaps identified, we formed the basis of our own game. Our game design has been divided into several stages, for each stage, we developed the theoretical gamification framework where we discussed different aspects of the game design fulfilling behavioral change theories. These also incorporate important persuasive design principles. We discuss the different features of the game and map different quality characteristics with the features and persuasive design principles.

Results. After successfully building the game, we delved deeper into the user evaluation study to discover how influential our developed game has proven in changing children’s behavior towards food wastage. We came to conclusion that 8/10 participants found the game idea very serious and deep. Many families admitted that the game taught them the concepts of food leftover management which they did not know about earlier. However 10% families agreed with the fact that the game gave them the chance to reflect upon themselves.

Conclusions. Food waste reasons vary from culture to culture. We might be summarizing the reasons of children wasting due to those reasons, but in many cultures, their is a lack of joint efforts between parents and children that causes these problems.Parents might be teaching their children those important concepts, yet they do not themselves practice at home which renders the lessons useless. Therefore all the household members need to jointly put efforts into sustainable practices. Moreover the game idea and design need to be a bit mature,especially the system of feedback and rewards. This system needs to be a bit mature so the players are more motivated to play this game.