Developing Persuasive Mobile Games for African Rural Audiences: Challenges implementing the Persuasive Techniques

Abstract

With the advent of cheap Android phones in the African Tech market, most people living in the rural areas of many African countries now have access to smartphones. These phones give them the opportunity to have an almost identical mobile phone experience as people living in urban areas or the Western world. This development opens a window of opportunity to leverage this high penetration of mobile devices to design application such as persuasive game interventions to assist individuals living in these communities to modify, change or shape their behaviours and attitudes in a desirable way. This paper explores the challenges and issues encountered in the design and use of persuasive mobile games as a tool to promote behaviour change among people living in the Rural African communities. It also highlights how these challenges affect the implementation of persuasive strategies, suggests design solutions for overcoming these challenges, and how persuasive games can be optimized to be appropriate for the target rural African populations. Some of these challenges are technically oriented (internet connectivity issues) while others are non-technically oriented (language diversity).