A Serious Game (“Fight With Virus”) for Preventing COVID-19 Health Rumors: Development and Experimental Study (Preprint)

Abstract

BACKGROUND This paper concerns the health rumor that emerged during the outbreak of the Covid-19 in early 2020, China. A lot of elders who was living in Wuhan suffered from the Covid-19 rumor. OBJECTIVE In contrast to the previous researcher, who focused on a comparative study and analysis of variables for detecting and controlling health rumor propagation, this study focused on designing a serious game as an experimental program to prevent and control health rumor. The focus of the study was explicitly on the context of the Social Networking Service (SNS) for elderly users. coronavirus. METHODS This method involves two major parts: adopting the TCP model for the games and developing the 5-point Lickert scale of cognitive questionnaires. The relevant variables of the experimental study were defined, and several hypotheses were proposed. Two hundred experimental subjects are selected to participate in the experiments. Through collecting relevant data in the experiments, statistical observations and comparative analysis are conducted to test whether the experimental hypothesis can be established. RESULTS In addition, the comparison and analysis consider the influence factors for the judgment and recognition of health rumor identified. Finally, the implications of the findings were discussed while future work was outlined. In this paper, we propose 10 hypothesis and test them by empirical study. It is notice that serious games is more capable of inspiring the interest of the research subjects in their understanding of the knowledge and learning of health commonsense than the traditional media. In judging and recognizing COVID-19 health rumor, the test group that use game education is stronger than another, in identifying rumors involved, and the accuracy rate of identifying health rumor of COVID-19 is higher. CONCLUSIONS Compared with the traditional media, the serious game can improve the elders' cognitive abilities effectively while they faced the health rumor, and the game play effect is related to the elder's age and educational background, contrary the income and gender variables make no impact.