[Colloq] Thesis Proposal - Designing and Evaluating a Drama Manager for Interactive Narrative-Based Games for Health - Friday May 24th, 2:30pm, 366 WVH

[Jessica Biron]

Thesis Proposal - Langxuan Yin 

Designing and Evaluating a Drama Manager for Interactive Narrative-Based Games for Health 

Friday, May 24th, 2:30pm 
366 WVH 






The dramatic increase in the interest in preventing disability and death through changes in lifestyle in the past two decades has lead to an increased number of health education and promotion programs delivered using automated information systems. These automated interventions have the potential to reach more users, to consistently deliver tailored materials, and to do so effectively and efficiently, but relatively low user retention rate is one particular challenge that existing health behavior change interventions are faced with. 




One possible way of increasing retention is by creating engaging health intervention systems. Researchers have started using video games as engaging artifacts of health intervention in the past few years. However, the majority of these games are not informed by research in health behavior change, have not been evaluated by comparison to standard health care interventions, and do not adapt to the diverse nature of individuals’ behavior change psychology. It is therefore difficult to analyze and identify the causal mechanism these games employ in health behavior change. 




To address these issues, I aim to design a drama manager—an algorithm that actively provides story structure for an ongoing interactive experience by intervening in the story world in such a way as to help a story to happen—which can be adapted to video games promoting health behavior change. I propose to incorporate a particular health behavior change theory, the Trans-Theoretical Model, into the design of the drama manager. I also propose a pilot study, three design studies that will inform the creation of a video game as the research platform of the drama manager, and a summative experiment to evaluate the impact of the drama manager on user engagement and health outcomes. 




Committee: 
Timothy Bickmore (Advisor) 
Magy Seif El-Nasr 
Stephen Intille 
Nick Montfort, Professor of Digital Media, MIT (external member)