The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Video game teaches youths lessons on risky behaviors
Yale study finds improved youth attitudes toward sex, other issues
NEW HAVEN — Street drugs, alcohol and sex are serious subjects for middle schoolers, but playing a video game may be the best way to learn about them and their potential dangers.
Dr. Lynn Fiellin tested that theory with city youths, age 11 to 14, and a role-playing game called PlayForward: Elm City Stories, and found that the young people’s knowledge about risky behaviors, as well as their attitudes, greatly improved after just 10 hours of playing the game.
One of the most impressive results was in the area of sexual behavior.
“We were able to determine that the teens who played the PlayForward game as compared with the control group had significant improvements in their attitudes … and their knowledge about sexual health and these improvements persisted for up to one year,” said Fiellin, director of the Yale Center for Health and Learning Games and the play2PREVENT Lab at Yale.
“Given that they played on average 10 hours of the game over six weeks but this impact stayed with them for a long time — that is impressive and we were very pleased with these findings,” she said.
Alex Rodriguez, 18, a senior at Wilbur Cross High School, participated in the study when he was a student at Clinton Avenue School. He said the game, which asks the player to choose how to respond to a given situation, taught him things he had not known before and has given him choices when he is with his friends.
“It helped me because some of these things I didn’t know,” Rodriguez said. “I never had ‘the talk’ with my parents. It really did help and I think for me it helped me to play a game because that’s what I do. I’m a gamer.”
Among the sexual issues brought up in the game were whether a girl can get pregnant the first time she has sex and whether to use protection, he said.
Other subjects addressed in the game were bullying, cheating, street drugs, alcohol abuse, HIV/ AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. A total of 333 11- to 14-year-olds participated in the two-year study at schools and at programs such as Leadership, Education, and Athletics in Partnership and the Police Athletic League in New Haven, Hamden and Bridgeport.
“I know someday … I’m going to have to make an adult decision,” Rodriguez said. “Nowadays in school you see a lot of people getting pregnant. … Maybe it wouldn’t happen to them” if they had learned the lessons the game offers, he said.
“It was our hope that through the game that they would make healthy decisions around risky behaviors like drugs and alcohol and sex,” said Tyra Pendergrass, associate director of the play2PREVENT Lab. “All of those story lines come straight from the mouth of the kids we worked with” in focus groups in New Haven County.
“Because those things are incorporated into the game, we were able to see that the kids who played had a higher percentage of knowledge acquisition than the kids who didn’t play the game,” Pendergrass said.
Fiellin said the youths were not just players, but integral to developing the game itself.
“We’ve spent about 18 months developing the game, working with our development company, Schell Games” of Pittsburgh, she said. “They basically vetted everything in the development of the game. … We basically did a number of different activities with them; we did focus groups. We could really say that the kids had helped create it. It was a true partnership with them.”
The youths’ involvement went beyond the subject matter to their look and feel.
“As teenagers are, they were honest,” Fiellin said. “If we brought them artwork that Schell Games had produced, they could say, ‘Kids don’t wear their hair like that’ or ‘Kids don’t wear their clothes like that.’ They really know their universe.”
Fiellin’s interest in serious video games came naturally.
“When I first started thinking about this my husband and I had five kids between us who were between 9 and 19 at that time, and everybody was playing something,” she sad. In her effort to “capture kids where they already were,” she applied for and received a five-year $4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health.
“That allowed us to really take the time and put in the effort and build these partnerships … and then rigorously evaluate it.”
One outcome that Fiellin and Pendergrass didn’t expect was the “very low rate of initiation of sex,” Fiellin said. “We did find very positive differences in their knowledge about health and their attitudes in sexual health” after the preteens and teens had played the game, she said.
Essence Santos-Eden, 18, who now is studying social work at Southern Connecticut State University, played the game when she attended Hillhouse High School.
“I learned that some people know right from wrong, but still make the wrong decisions,” she said.
“My point of view is this game would be very helpful,” SantosEden said. “I know definitely the choices I should be making [and] should not be making. … It was a fun way to learn about things rather than being told things.”
While PlayForward was played on an iPad, it may become even more advanced. The play2PREVENT Lab has received grant money to create a virtual reality version, Pendergrass said.
“That would be dope,” Rodriguez said. “You’re put in that position and people could see themselves in that predicament.
“It would be cool to have this game in virtual reality and have it in school and have teachers be able to teach it.”
Rodriguez said learning about making major decisions through a video game is an apt way for teens to have their questions answered.
“I feel as though what they’re doing is a good thing for kids in general because I wasn’t really taught about these things. I feel like society turns away from these topics,” Rodriguez said.