The Behaviour Change Wheel to Support the Design of Gameful Interventions

Abstract

Gameful interventions (including serious games and gamification) are a popular tool to motivate and engage users towards improved behavioural outcomes. However, such interventions often fail due to poor design, specifically due to a fundamental lack of understanding of the audience and the required behavioural outcomes, and the consequent uninformed selection of potentially inappropriate game elements by designers. This chapter describes exploring the behaviour change wheel (BCW) method as a tool to augment gameful intervention design and selecting appropriate game elements to action gameful intervention strategies. This exploration is undertaken in the context of developing a gameful intervention targeted toward energy conservation. Within this context, the BCW is shown to assist the designers in understanding the audience and the intervention's behavioural outcomes, which has led to a theoretically informed and rigorous selection of game elements that better support the achievement of the targeted behavioural outcomes.