6 269 EXPLICIT MESSAGING PROMOTES GAME SELECTION Figure 1 Screenshots from the video game Monument Valley. (A) A building before the dark khaki section is rotated. The player’s aim is to have the avatar in white reach the top of this building. (B) The same building after rotating the dark khaki section, allowing the player to find a new path upward. These images are reproduced from Monument Valley by Ustwo Games (2014a) with the permission of the copyright holder Ustwo Games. For this study, we created two distinguishable trailers of Monument Valley allowing us to attribute any differences in game choice or game experience to messaging while participants were unaware of this manipulation. Screenshots taken from the later levels and expansion levels of Monument Valley were used in the trailers to make it unlikely for participants to encounter these levels during the experiment. We differentiated the trailers on several aspects to create the impression that the trailers were portraying two separate games. Pilot studies were conducted to make sure that potential participants indeed believed that the two trailers advertised two different games. Information regarding pilot studies are available upon request. The trailers, which we will refer to as the detailed and the abstract trailer, were both approximately 1-min
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