Designing a serious game for community-based disease prevention in the Amazon

Many developing regions around the world rely on community-based healthcare strategies and practices to deal with prevention and control of often neglected diseases, by educating the local population and healthcare professionals, on the mechanisms by which such diseases spread and how they can be controlled. In this paper we describe a multiplayer serious game designed to raise awareness, and foster adoption of preventive measures among local citizens and community-health professionals about Leishmaniosis. We also discuss how the underlying concept for this game and its mechanics have been iteratively designed and developed in collaboration with a group of people with relevant medical and research expertise as well as practical knowledge resulting from working with our target population

Point of Contact:Investigating change in perception through a serious game for COVID-19 preventive measures

COVID-19 exposed the need to identify newer tools to understand perception of information, behavioral conformance to instructions and model the effects of individual motivation and decisions on the success of measures being put in place. We approach this challenge through the lens of serious games. Serious games are designed to instruct and inform within the confines of their magic circle. We built a multiplayer serious game, Point of Contact (PoC), to investigate effects of a serious game on perception and behavior. We conducted a study with 23 participants to gauge perceptions of COVID-19 preventive measures and quantify the change after playing PoC. The results show a significant positive change to participants’ perceptions towards COVID-19 preventive measures, shifting perceptions towards following guidelines more strictly due to a greater awareness of how the virus spreads. We discuss these implications and the value of a serious game like PoC towards pandemic risk modelling at a microcosm level