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

TL;DR

This paper tackles procrastination by reframing it as a learning topic within HCI, proposing ProcrastiMate, a text-adventure game designed to teach the causes of procrastination and test coping strategies.Grounded in Steel's four causes of procrastination, the game integrates 40 coping strategies across four chapters and uses a counselor role to foster psychological distance while preserving relatability.A two-week field study with 27 participants demonstrates that ProcrastiMate promotes learning and self-reflection, reduces avoidance-related negative emotions, and supports real-life experimentation with new strategies, though challenges remain for translating knowledge into lasting behavior change.The study contributes design insights for balancing personal relevance with psychological distance in serious games, and discusses implications for applying educational game approaches to other psychologically charged topics in HCI.

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.

Figures (7)

• Figure 1: The overall research aim of our study and the corresponding research pipeline
• Figure 2: The initial gameplay and the formative study settings: a) The gameplay designed for formative study with initial design elements, b) The physical components prepared for participants; c)The formative study setup.
• Figure 3: Overview of ProcrastiMate. a) The game structure is based on four causes of procrastination and 40 coping strategies. The correspondences between causes and strategies guides the gameplay and determines the win conditions. The causes are organised into four chapters, each requiring six strategy cards to be filled in. b) Core gameplay mechanics in Level 1, challenging players to identify effective coping strategies for each cause; c) Gameplay in Level 2 requires players to diagnose the underlying causes of eight procrastination scenarios.
• Figure 4: Upper: Three design considerations for crafting procrastination stories in Level 1. Lower: A translated, detailed example of core gameplay in Level 1.
• Figure 5: Upper: Four design considerations for crafting procrastination stories in Level 2. Lower: A translated, detailed example of core gameplay in Level 2.