Abstract
Interactive narrative technologies for preventive health care offer significant potential for promoting health behavior change in adolescents. By improving adolescents’ knowledge, personal efficacy, and self-regulatory skills these technologies hold great promise for realizing positive impacts on adolescent health. These potential benefits are enabled through story-centric learning experiences that provide opportunities for adolescents to practice strategies to reduce risky health behaviors in engaging game-based environments. A distinctive feature of interactive narrative that promotes engagement is players’ ability to influence the story through the choices they make. In this paper, we present initial work investigating engagement in an interactive narrative that focuses on reducing adolescents’ risky behaviors around alcohol use. Specifically, we consider how the short-term and long-term goals adolescents choose as being important to the protagonist character relates to their engagement with the interactive narrative. Leveraging interaction log data from a pilot study with 20 adolescents, we conduct a cluster-based analysis of the goals players selected. We then examine how engagement differs between the identified clusters. Results indicate that adolescents’ choices for the protagonist’s short-term and long-term goals can significantly impact their engagement with the interactive narrative.
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Notes
- 1.
One participant did not complete the pre-survey questionnaire; however, they did complete the interactive narrative and post-survey questionnaire, so their data is included in the analysis.
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Acknowledgements
This research was primarily supported by the National Science Foundation through grants IIS-1344803 and IIS-1344670 and the National Cancer Institute through grant R01CA247705. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation or the National Cancer Institute.
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Mott, M. et al. (2021). “What’s Important to You, Max?”: The Influence of Goals on Engagement in an Interactive Narrative for Adolescent Health Behavior Change. In: Mitchell, A., Vosmeer, M. (eds) Interactive Storytelling. ICIDS 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13138. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92300-6_37
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