Increasing Anti-Tobacco Industry Attitudes Among Youth: A Pilot Study of a Multiplayer Educational Board Game.

OBJECTIVE: An anti-tobacco educational board game, Smoke Stacks, was designed to engage youth in critical thinking regarding marketing practices of tobacco companies and tobacco's harmful effects. A pilot study was conducted to examine whether playing this theoretically informed that board game increased knowledge about tobacco use and negative attitudes toward tobacco companies, and decreased behavioral intentions to use tobacco. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Sixty-seven teenagers aged 14-18 participated in the game assessment. Pre-/postevaluation methods were used to assess change in participant attitudes, knowledge, and intentions following gameplay. RESULTS: Compared to baseline, participants reported substantially increased self-perceived knowledge of the health effects of tobacco (P = 0.001) and were significantly more likely to agree that tobacco companies encourage young people to start smoking (P = 0.001), and that tobacco companies deny that cigarettes cause cancer and other diseases (P = 0.002). CONCLUSION: This pilot study demonstrates that youth who played Smoke Stacks gained perceived knowledge and increased negative attitudes toward tobacco company tactics for encouraging smoking and discounting potential health risks of cigarettes.

Embedded Game Design as a Method for Addressing Social Determinants of Health.

This paper, describes the design, development, and evaluation of The Test, a theory-based mobile game prototype designed to promote HIV testing by providing information and influencing motivations, and behavioral intentions among YMSM. The Test was designed using embedded design, first described by Kaufman & Flanagan (2015), which diverges from traditional "educational game" design strategies by mixing on-message content with nonfocal content, in an attempt to make the overall experience more approachable and engaging. One challenge of embedded design is that it targets attitudes and actions that are not always proximate to a particular behavior. Games with embedded content forgo explicit takeaways, and their possible distal effects present a challenge to traditional tests of efficacy. The benefit of embedded design, however, is that its holistic or ecological design approach (which considers feelings, emotions, affects, social relations, and connections to broader communities) stands in close alignment with the social-ecological model.