Abstract
There has been a growing interest in Serious Games, more specifically on how they blend seriousness with entertainment and an interest on how certain video games use persuasion techniques to change players’ awareness or to promote discussion on some serious issues. The objective of this dissertation is to develop a video game with the purpose of raising players’ awareness for the conciliation of agriculture with biodiversity in the region of Castro Verde and motivate the players to know more about the business and economics of agriculture. To achieve this, we investigated the characteristics and design strategies of Serious Games and we investigated how techniques and strategies of persuasion can be implemented in video games in order to create entertaining persuasive gameplay. Further, we investigated some video games that implemented such techniques and analysed how they were achieved. We came up with an approach on how to translate real-world context into persuasive gameplay elements so players were drawn to the agricultural and environmental issues of Castro Verde. We conducted tests to assess the effectiveness of the persuasive gameplay. The final evaluation results were consistent with our objective, which states that implementing persuasion techniques and strategies in our game persuades players to be aware of the issues of Castro Verde.