The Bronx High School of Science

SeriousGames@Google: PlayForward: Using Games to Improve Adolescent Health

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• published: 17 Jul 2013
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Google Tech Talk July 11, 2013 (more info below) ABSTRACT Play2Prevent is a new initiative aimed at forging collaborations and partnerships between scientists, educators, video game designers/developers, community based organizations and others. Based at Yale University, Play2Prevent builds on the evolving and expanding area of "serious games", a field defined as videogames or versions of videogames intended for use outside of entertainment, for example, in the fields of education or health. Play2Prevent's first game is PlayForward: Elm City Stories. Currently part of a randomized clinical trial, PlayForward is an interactive world in which the player "travels" through life, facing challenges and making decisions that bring different risks and benefits. The player is able to see how important choices in risky settings can affect their lives. In the game players learn how negotiating challenges using skills they acquire in PlayForward can translate to real life providing them with positive health skills that can decrease their risk for STDs including HIV. As games move beyond entertainment, new best practices in design, are being established that combine best approaches established in commercial entertainment games with the special needs of games for areas like health behavior change. During this talk members of the PlayForward production and research team will present the project including its underlying science along with how they learned to blend together practices and experts from games, health, to create a novel health intervention. SPEAKER INFO Lynn E. Fiellin: Lynn E. Fiellin, M.D. is an Associate Professor of Medicine at the Yale University School of Medicine. Her work, which has been funded by the NIH and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, is focused in the area of creating innovative models for prevention and treatment. Most recently, she has been awarded a five-year grant from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to develop and test an interactive video game for the purpose of risk reduction and HIV prevention in at-risk young teens. With this project she created Play2Prevent™, a new initiative aimed at forging collaborations and partnerships between scientists, educators, videogame designers/developers, community based organizations and others with the goal being to develop innovative targeted interventions and educational materials for risk reduction and prevention in youth and young adults.Play2Prevent's first game, PlayForward: Elm City Stories, has been developed in conjunction with Digitalmill and Schell Games. Produced for tablet computers, it focuses on risk reduction and HIV prevention in 11-14 year old at-risk youth and is currently being rigorously tested with 330 teens in a randomized controlled trial. Ben Sawyer: Ben Sawyer is the co-founder of Digitalmill, a games consulting firm based in Portland, Maine. Since beginning his career in game development over ten years ago, Sawyer has pioneered major initiatives in the field of serious games and has become a nationally recognized leader within the games community. For the past ten+ years, Sawyer has dedicated his professional life to discovering new ways to expand the use of games beyond entertainment. In 2002, he co-founded the Serious Games Initiative, a project of the U.S. Government's Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. The following year, Sawyer organized the first-ever Serious Games Summit. In 2004, Sawyer also co-founded the Games for Health project, an initiative which has built the primary social and professional networks of the health games industry. The Games for Health project receives major funding from the Pioneer Portfolio, an initiative of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. As a game developer, Sawyer has worked on over two dozen major serious game projects, which started with "Virtual U". Produced for the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, "Virtual U," a university simulation game, was an Independent Games Festival finalist later that year. Prior to pursuing his professional career, Sawyer graduated from the Bronx High School of Science and studied at Baruch College. In 2013 he was a presented with a Dewey Winburne Community Service Award by SxSW Interactive.