Games Health J. 2012 Feb 15;1(1):37-44. doi: 10.1089/g4h.2011.0011.
Story Immersion in a Health Videogame for Childhood Obesity Prevention.
Games for health journal
Amy Shirong Lu, Debbe Thompson, Janice Baranowski, Richard Buday, Tom Baranowski
Affiliations
Affiliations
- Indiana University School of Informatics, Indianapolis, Indiana.
PMID: 24066276
PMCID: PMC3779587 DOI: 10.1089/g4h.2011.0011
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: Stories can serve as powerful tools for health interventions. Story immersion refers to the experience of being absorbed in a story. This is among the first studies to analyze story immersion's role in health videogames among children by addressing two main questions: Will children be more immersed when the main characters are similar to them? Do increased levels of immersion relate to more positive health outcomes?
SUBJECTS AND METHODS: Eighty-seven 10-12-year-old African-American, Caucasian, and Hispanic children from Houston, TX, played a health videogame, "Escape from Diab" (Archimage, Houston, TX), featuring a protagonist with both African-American and Hispanic phenotypic features. Children's demographic information, immersion, and health outcomes (i.e., preference, motivation, and self-efficacy) were recorded and then correlated and analyzed.
RESULTS: African-American and Hispanic participants reported higher immersion scores than Caucasian participants (
CONCLUSION: Ethnic similarity between videogame characters and players enhanced immersion and several health outcomes. Effectively embedding characters with similar phenotypic features to the target population in interactive health videogame narratives may be important when motivating children to adopt obesity prevention behaviors.
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