Abstract:

Human trafficking is a global humanitarian issue, with over 20 million victims trafficked worldwide. To increase public awareness, serious games are being developed to educate players on various themes including traffickers’ strategies and red flags. However, these games have been scarcely evaluated to determine their effectiveness. As such, we conducted a study to evaluate five of the most common games on the market (MISSING, ACT, BAN, SAFE, and UNTRAFFICKED) in terms of user experience and effectiveness. We recruited 31 students to play all five games and provide feedback on perceived usability, attractiveness, motivation and educational utility. Our data analyses showed that overall the games were perceived as attractive, usable, motivational, and educational. However, some were perceived better than the others on certain measures. UNTRAFFICKED was viewed as most engaging, enjoyable and immersive, MISSING as most appealing and challenging, and SAFE was perceived as the least on all measures. All five games were rated high on user learning but low on relevance to user interests. The findings indicated that while human trafficking games are easy to use and good at getting their messages across, there is a need for improvements in realism and relevance. Particularly, they have to do more to get more players interested in the issue to increase awareness and participation in the fight against human trafficking.

Keywords:

Human trafficking, sex trafficking, serious game, user experience, motivation.