An interactive videogame intervention targeting risk reduction and HIV prevention in younger adolescents.
PlayForward: Elm City Stories (PlayForward) serves as the foundation for the play2PREVENT Lab and was funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. PlayForward is a videogame for adolescents aged 11-14 focused on overall risk reduction, sexual health, HIV prevention, and a range of risky behaviors including but not limited to substance use, sexual risk,academic dishonesty, and unsafe driving. It is a theory- and evidence-informed role-playing game in a graphic novel style, that offers an engaging way for adolescents to learn information and skills to reduce their risk for adverse outcomes.
PlayForward provides an interactive world where players, using an avatar they have created, ‘‘travel’’ through time, facing challenges such as peer pressure to drink alcohol or engage in risky sexual behaviors. Players experience how their choices affect their future by “fast-forwarding” to their character’s Epilogue, and then are able to go back in time and change their choices, creating different outcomes. PlayForward is designed to provide at-risk young teens the opportunity to acquire and practice skills for risk reduction and HIV prevention. It incorporates evidence-based concepts from prominent behavior change theories, including social learning theory, self-efficacy, social norms, prospect theory and message framing, and delay discounting as well as constructs related to social and emotional learning and character development.
Our team tested the efficacy of PlayForward by conducting a 24-month randomized controlled trial enrolling 330 participants, aged 11-14, who were recruited from 12 community-based programs. PlayForward improved sexual health attitudes and knowledge, with an impact that persisted for 12 months from baseline. Evaluation of 24 month outcomes is underway. Read more about PlayFoward’s impact here.
