designing a self-efficacy game for health literacy in marginalized communities
my name is morgan and this is my team
this is our research partner an nih program that fosters health literacy through library and home-based activities
our partner challenge us to address health inequities. these are systemic problems so
where can we make a difference with individually focused interventions, for example, through a local library?
our partner can't fix the system but they can give people more freedom and power to
use it to their advantage this isn't instead of systemic interventions but in addition to
we seek to increase health literacy what people know about health and give them good information
we also want them to increase their self-efficacy or their ability to use that information
our target population are people who've experienced bias in health care our intervention
is for use of the library and or at home we seek to increase health literacy and self-efficacy
using self-efficacy theory in a visual novel game previous work has shown that visual novel games
can affect self-efficacy bandura proposed building self-efficacy for changing self-directed behaviors
including in the domain of personal health i will now introduce our game design highlighting how key
interactions and body vendors framework this is our visual novel bloomwood stories block party
the player character is embedded in the community and is a non-expert in health literacy
this is your community where you find people and institutions to interact with
and throughout the game the player encounters a variety of topics related to narratives of
non-player characters (npc) community members, this largely includes health literacy we believe this
positions the player as a key player in the npc's interventions all while motivating the player to
foster the skills and solve the problem practice by making decisions and maintaining social support
your community has a library a health clinic and a community center and at each of these
community institutions the player gets to interact with an npc who works there
the goal of the game is to help npcs solve quests
and raise community engagement before the block party at the end of the week
the role of the player illustrates self-efficacy theory through collecting
npc problems positioning them as a non-expert in health and embedding them in the community
rashad williams is a head librarian of the bloomwood library and as a player you engage
with npcs like rashad through the visual novel interface reading through dialogue and making
dialogue choices as a community leader the player decisions determine what information is revealed
and using that information the player offers learned information in order to solve other npc's
quests the player tests the information they've learned and receives feedback from the npc through
illustration and dialogue in the dialogue loop the player gets to apply learned knowledge and
information to directly solve npc problems they also get to receive feedback from the mpc based
on their suggestion and iterate depending on the quality of the npc's response finally your
cell phone is an interface where information is automatically collected from conversations
with npcs the more information you gather the better and tagging information allows the player
to reflect and synthesize learned information collecting information is a key interaction to
solving quests and learning contextually relevant health information directly aligns with our goals
by labeling the information the player is afforded a moment of reflection to synthesize and evaluate
the information as it related to active quests or information that was previously learned
future work consists of conducting focus groups and evaluating the efficacy of
our game using randomized control trials thank you