Designing Serious Games for Safety Education: "Learn to Brace" vs. Traditional Pictorials for Aircraft Passengers
Authors:Chittaro L.
Published in:IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, vol. 22, no. 5, May 2016, pp. 1527-1539.
Abstract:Serious games for safety education (SGSE) are a novel tool for preparing people to prevent and/or handle risky
situations. Although several SGSE have been developed, design and evaluation methods for SGSE need to be better grounded in
and guided by safety-relevant psychological theories. In particular, this paper focuses on threat appeals and the assessment of
variables, such as safety locus of control, that influence human behavior in real risky situations. It illustrates how we took into
account such models in the design and evaluation of “Learn to Brace”, a first-of-its-kind serious game that deals with a major
problem in aviation safety, i.e. the scarce effectiveness of the safety cards used by airlines. The study considered a sample of 48
users: half of them received instructions about the brace position through the serious game, the other half through a traditional
safety card pictorial. Results showed that the serious game was much more effective than the traditional instructions both in terms of
learning and of changing safety-relevant perceptions, especially safety locus of control and recommendation perception.
