Walk in Their Shoes to Navigate Your Own Path: Learning About Procrastination Through A Serious Game

TL;DR

This paper introduces ProcrastiMate, a serious game designed to educate players about procrastination causes and coping strategies, fostering self-reflection and motivation to apply learned concepts in real life.

Contribution

It presents the design and evaluation of a serious game for learning about procrastination, filling a gap in HCI research on supporting psychological learning processes.

Findings

ProcrastiMate facilitated learning and self-reflection among players.

Players reported increased motivation to apply coping strategies in daily life.

The game maintained psychological distance, aiding comfortable exploration of sensitive topics.

Abstract

Procrastination, the voluntary delay of tasks despite potential negative consequences, has prompted numerous time and task management interventions in the HCI community. While these interventions have shown promise in addressing specific behaviors, psychological theories suggest that learning about procrastination itself may help individuals develop their own coping strategies and build mental resilience. However, little research has explored how to support this learning process through HCI approaches. We present ProcrastiMate, a text adventure game where players learn about procrastination's causes and experiment with coping strategies by guiding in-game characters in managing relatable scenarios. Our field study with 27 participants revealed that ProcrastiMate facilitated learning and self-reflection while maintaining psychological distance, motivating players to integrate newly acquired knowledge in daily life. This paper contributes empirical insights on leveraging serious games to facilitate learning about procrastination and offers design implications for addressing psychological challenges through HCI approaches.