Games That Teach, Chats That Convince: Comparing Interactive and Static Formats for Persuasive Learning

2026-02-20

AI Summary

This study investigates how different interactive formats—static articles, conversational chatbots, and narrative text-based games—affect persuasive impact and learning outcomes on sustainability topics, under the constraint of content equivalence. Through a controlled experiment combining subjective questionnaires and a 24-hour delayed knowledge test, the research systematically compares these media in terms of users’ perceived issue importance and objective knowledge retention. Findings reveal a dissociation between subjective learning experience and actual knowledge retention: while the chatbot most effectively enhanced perceived importance, the text-based game, despite being undervalued by participants for its educational utility, yielded the highest performance on the delayed test. These results highlight critical design trade-offs among interactivity, perceived authenticity, and learning efficacy, offering empirical guidance for the development of educational media.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: Game Design — Virtual Humans, NPCs and Autonomous Characters
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Mining of Visual, Multimedia & Multimodal Data
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Sustainability of Web economics
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Metrics for user behavior and evaluating success
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Robustness and generalizability of Web mining methods

Abstract

Interactive systems such as chatbots and games are increasingly used to persuade and educate on sustainability-related topics, yet it remains unclear how different delivery formats shape learning and persuasive outcomes when content is held constant. Grounding on identical arguments and factual content across conditions, we present a controlled user study comparing three modes of information delivery: static essays, conversational chatbots, and narrative text-based games. Across subjective measures, the chatbot condition consistently outperformed the other modes and increased perceived importance of the topic. However, perceived learning did not reliably align with objective outcomes: participants in the text-based game condition reported learning less than those reading essays, yet achieved higher scores on a delayed (24-hour) knowledge quiz. Additional exploratory analyses further suggest that common engagement proxies, such as verbosity and interaction length, are more closely related to subjective experience than to actual learning. These findings highlight a dissociation between how persuasive experiences feel and what participants retain, and point to important design trade-offs between interactivity, realism, and learning in persuasive systems and serious games.

Problem

• persuasive learning
• interactive systems
• chatbots
• serious games
• learning outcomes

Innovation

• persuasive learning
• interactive systems
• chatbots
• serious games
• learning outcomes