Computer games could be a valuable tool to educate young adults about Covid-19 and the benefits of preventative measures, such as social distancing and mask-wearing. Exploring the idea of using computer games to spread public health messages, a team of computer scientists from Lancaster University created a game about the consequences of Covid-19.
The game is aimed at 19-25-year-olds, who have been identified by the World Health Organisation as the least compliant regarding Covid-19 preventative measures. This group is also less engaged with more traditional ways to spread information, like newspapers and television.
“Covid-19 has highlighted the need to find new tools to understand the perception of risks and, in turn, behaviours around conformity to preventative instructions. We wanted to explore serious educational games to engage members of the public and change their perception about the pandemic and preventative measures, particularly with younger people who may not engage with traditional channels and forms of media”, said Dr Abe Karnik, based at Lancaster University’s School of Computing and Communications. “A serious game provides this group with a new innovative way to learn covid-19 safety measures in an accessible, engaging and non-intrusive way and on a format, they are familiar with.”
The game, called “Point of Contact”, was inspired by the popular game “Among us”. The game takes place in a shared office room where players must perform tasks to increase the overall score. However, the twist is that one of the players is infected with Covid-19. The game also includes a health score looking at how many players get infected.
As the game unfolds, the players have to perform their tasks while trying to avoid getting infected by following some preventative measures such as washing hands, opening windows and wearing a mask. Players can also be voted into quarantine if they have a high risk of transmission, but this means they can’t contribute to the overall score.
The game calculates the probability of each player getting infected based on factors like proximity to an infected player or touching infected objects. To be realistic, the calculations also consider that some players are asymptomatic while others have severe symptoms.
As a test, the team invited 23 young players to try out the game. After playing, the participants revealed that they vastly underestimated how often they broke the social distancing rules. Playing the game altered the participant’s perception of risk and changed their minds regarding the balance between keeping their livelihood and saving other people’s lives. After the game, most participants would favour saving lives and only 13% were still committed to protecting the economy. In addition, almost 90% of participants said they would be more careful in their everyday life.
The game will not be released to the general public, but it shows that this type of game can be used to spread important public health messages capable of reaching different demographics. “We expected the participants to view the preventative measures more favourably and actually perform them more as the game-play progressed. While this was confirmed, we were not expecting such a drastic shift in favour of health and against the economy. The result showed us the real impact of the serious game can have on altering perception through a simulated experience”, concluded Dr Karnik.
Hill J, Corke E, Salawu M, Cotterell E, Russell M, Gibbons J, Mu T, Karnik A (2021) Point of contact: investigating change in perception through a serious game for Covid-19 preventative measures. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 274, 1–19 https://doi.org/10.1145/3474701