[Colloq] Updated - PhD Defense - Langxuan Yin - Fri, May 1st, 2pm - The Construction and Evaluation of a Design Framework for Narrative Games for Health

Biron, Jessica j.biron at neu.edu
Wed Apr 22 15:54:55 EDT 2015


Who: Langxuan Yin

When: Fri, May 1st, <x-apple-data-detectors://1> 2pm

Where: 366 WVH

Title: The Construction and Evaluation of a Design Framework for Narrative Games for Health

Abstract:

The leading cause of death in the United States and in the world today is chronic disease, and lifestyle health behaviors—such as physical activity, diet, and smoking—are the most prominent contributors to these diseases and other causes of death. Changing lifestyle health behaviors is a difficult, long-term process and often requires education regarding the behavior and help from counselors. However, not everyone has access to counselors at the time and place they are needed. To address this, there have been many attempts to develop computerized health behavior change interventions, which offer wide accessibility and low cost relative to human counselors. However, several studies have shown that these interventions suffer from disuse and automated longitudinal interventions suffer from high attrition rates.


Computer games may solve these problems by providing a particularly engaging medium that keep users’ attention for extended periods of time. As a larger number of games for health were developed over the past two decades, studies were conducted to evaluate these games, and a vast majority of them yielded positive results. However, many problems with the design of these games, as well as with the methodologies used to evaluate them emerged: the games were generally designed without the consultation or direct involvement of a professional game designer, and created without the guidance of a proper game design framework; the health messages delivered in the games were mostly simple and knowledge-oriented and not crafted based on theories from behavioral medicine; and the evaluation studies were also poorly designed.


In this work, I define the DraGuNa (Drama-Guided Narrative Health Game) framework, a methodology that uses drama theory and sound principles from behavioral medicine to guide games for health design to solve the current problems in games for health. The contributions of this thesis are three-fold. First, the thesis introduces a methodology of game design, specifically developed for games for health, which addresses two key constructs: engagement – ensuring users stick with the game for the duration of the intervention; and adherence – ensuring users perform those actions in the game hypothesized by behavioral medicine theories to lead to health behavior change.  Second, it provides a methodology to develop interactive narrative-based games based on existing story media, which also suggests a new path of research for the intelligent narrative community. Finally, the thesis provides an experimental framework for testing the effects of a game on the two fundamental dimensions of player involvement in the intervention – engagement and adherence – and tests the relative contributions of each on health outcomes.

Committee:

Timothy Bickmore (advisor), Northeastern University

Stephen Intille, Northeastern University

Magy Seif El-Nasr, Northeastern University

Nick Montfort, Massachusetts Institute of Technology





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