Enhancing protective role-playing behaviors through avatar-based scenarios

Serious Games Supporting the Prevention and Treatment of Alcohol and Drug Consumption in Youth: Scoping Review

“…The study by Hong et al [34] reported that participants improved from before to after the game in intention to drink less alcohol and in drinking refusal self-efficacy, where the enjoyment of the game was a key feature. The results reported in the study by Hughes et al [36] indicate that participants from the intervention group were more likely to adopt protective behaviors such as trying to stop somebody from driving after drinking and using a designated driver than participants in the control condition. One of these studies also demonstrated that participants in a game session to provide information about potential risks of substance abuse during nightlife events evaluated the serious game to be as positive and credible as more traditional information tools such as leaflets [54].…”

“…Most of the evaluated serious games (18/29, 62%) were developed to support the prevention of substance use, whereas the rest of the serious games (11/29, 38%) were focused on the enhancement of the provided treatment or on supporting individuals during specific stages of their treatment. All the serious games designed with prevention objectives (18/29, 62%) implemented their games' mechanics to facilitate the increase of knowledge on different topics, such as the negative consequences of nonmedical prescription drug use [29], the biological consequences of the abuse of inhalants [30], how the brain is affected by alcohol and other drugs [31,32], how to identify and reduce risky health behaviors [33,34] as well as carry out protective behavioral techniques [35,36], and the effects and consequences of alcohol and drug consumption [37,38].…”

“…Complementarily, the serious games focused on treatment (11/29, 38%) were designed to complement the therapeutic process for individuals with addiction problems or at risk and minimize relapse [39,40], reduce consumption [41][42][43][44], support recovery efforts [45], and promote a better adherence to the treatment [26,27]. Regarding the design of use, most of the serious games developed with prevention objectives (18/29, 62%) were stand-alone applications, and just a few (4/13, 31%) were designed as part of school-based prevention courses or curricula where teachers or social workers acted as facilitators [28,29,32,36,46]. On the contrary, most of the serious games developed with objectives to support treatment (11/29, 38%) were designed as technological-based tools to be used under the supervision of treatment providers.…”

“…Most of the studies only mentioned the platform where the serious game could be executed: web-based (11/29, 38%), mobile app (7/29, 24%), multi-platform (3/29, 10%), or PC-based (2/29, 7%). The studies that provided more technical detail mentioned the use of virtual reality for the creation of immersive environments [31,40], the use of a Kinect device for a motion-based interaction [45,48], the implementation of branching predefined dialogues to create interactive narrative experiences [26,27,33], the integration with Facebook to simulate a social serious game [51], and the use of a computational framework [56] that facilitated the creation and remote control (as in Wizard-of-Oz scenarios) of avatars for interaction purposes [36].…”