Hi, I’m Valentijn Visch, initiator of the Persuasive Game Design group at the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering of the Technical University Delft. I started to work at this faculty in 2009 having a background in arts, cinema and emotion psychology and aimed to design for emotional change. However, I experienced that people have a quite robust emotional regulation system prohibiting them from emotional changes they don’t want. Therefore I tried to do design research for people who want to change, but have trouble in doing this by themselves, such as mental healthcare clients. It turned out that most mental healthcare therapies are verbal by nature and can be supported by designed products, especially if these products involve motivational game-elements.

Soon the design of game elements was no longer restricted to mental healthcare but it turned out to be of value for other application domains as well, like physical healthcare or education. I received grants for two large persuasive game design projects: the CRISP G-Motiv project, in which we research and design game-elements for social, physical, and mental change. And the ClickNl NextLevel project, in which we research and design prototypes for gamification, validation, and implementation of online mental healthcare modules. Both projects involve partners from science, creative industry and user organisations in order to ensure effects of our prototypes and relevance of our game knowledge. During these projects, we found that quite a bunch of people at this faculty conduct research fully or partly related to persuasive game design. This PGD group and website is constructed to share our experiences, knowledge, prototypes and questions to our colleagues, students, partners and anyone interested.