VIDEODOPE: Applying Persuasive Technology to Improve Awareness ...

VIDEODOPE: Applying Persuasive Technology to Improve Awareness of Drugs Abuse Effects Luciano Gamberini, Luca Breda, and Alessandro Grassi Human Technology Lab Department of General Psychology University of Padua, Italy

Abstract. Videodope is an interactive digital environment that is meant to show the short-, medium- and long-run effects of psychoactive substances on the human organism. Its purpose is to increase the users’ knowledge of these effects, which is often based on misconceptions and legends, and to provide a feedback on their level of information, with preventive purposes. These kind of educational games have the advantage of being more persistent, ubiquitous, informative, anonymous and multi-medial than a normal lecture. However, they have to be perceived as credible and plausible to the user in order to be persuasive, especially since the target is constituted of young people familiar both with the technology and with the subject. In this paper, we will describe the process of designing and evaluating the videogame in the field, as well as the insights provided by the participants who took part to the evaluation.

1 Theoretical Background This paper describes a digital environment devoted to an application in the area of persuasive technologies. This area studies the use of technical artifacts designed to modify the users’ believes, attitudes and behaviors without any explicit persuasive message, and without any coercion or defeat [1]. These technologies are applied to education, to provide interactive lessons on selected subjects or to promote specific types of safety behaviors in the users [2]. Tools such as educational videogames can be able to capture the user by adopting a language they like [3] and offer the advantages of scalability, persistency, ubiquity, anonymity, multimodality and can store, access, and manipulate huge volumes of data [1]. It can approach users in situations where a physician or an educator would be perceived as inadequate or even hostile, and can be used in a variety of settings, individual or shared, local or networked. One area of intervention that seems particularly challenging is the prevention of psychoactive substance abuse. In Italy, where this software was developed and tested, the highest consumers of psychoactive substances are people aged 15 to 24, as emerged from an anonymous survey conducted on a random sample of respondents from a representative amount of municipalities [4]. The contexts in which the assumption is more likely to occur are connected to night aggregation (concerts, R. Shumaker (Ed.): Virtual Reality, HCII 2007, LNCS 4563, pp. 633–641, 2007. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007

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L. Gamberini, L. Breda, and A. Grassi

private parties, clubs and discos), and specific music genres [5]. The increased use of cannabis and cocaine, the great diffusion of so-called 'designer drugs' where psychotropic molecules are combined and manipulated to obtain new effects, and the multiple abuse of different substances depict a complex phenomenon that needs adequate tools to be coped with [5, 6]. Becker’s underlies that the use of substances has sub-cultural roots [7]; any ‘deviance’ is conceived as the consequence of the acquisition of norms and values from the group of belonging. The reason for trying and assume a substance is mediated by the sub-cultural context to which the person belongs, whose believes and information are also responsible for shaping the way in which the risk associated to the consumption of substances is perceived [7]. It has been shown for instance that the dangerousness of risky behaviors such as driving upon assumption of psychoactive substances [8] or the addictiveness of certain substances [9] are generally underestimated. The interactive environment that we present here is called ‘Videodope’, and is meant to provide information on the consequences of the abuse of psychoactive substances in order to improve awareness in the target users and t counter the commonsensical knowledge that often informs risky behaviors. It may represent an effective way to approach adolescents and young adults with an informative proposal that is consonant with their own language, with the kind of music and graphics they are accustomed with and that can be offered directly in the places they use to go. Classic preventive strategies may look boring, ridiculous or even hostile. Even though an educational videogame seems more adequate to reach young people where they aggregate and have fun, in order to be convincing it must take into account the habits and environment in which consumers leave. In fact, a determinant role in a persuasive process is played by the relevance and appropriateness of the way in which the information is proposed, as well as by the credibility of such information [10, 11, 12]. Dutta-Bergman, for instance, conducted a study on health information available on the Internet and found that it the more complete it was perceived, the more credible is was judged [13]. This concern about credibility has informed the development and testing of Videodope, which will be described in the following paragraphs.

2 The Digital Environment Videodope is a non -immersive virtual environment developed with Virtools Dev 3.0 and 3D Studio Max. It contains an informative module and a comprehension check. The former is based on the idea of showing a model of a human being. The organs affected by a selected drug appear in transparency, along with the information on the damages derived from abuse. The other module is a quiz-like test, with questions related to the information displayed in the previous module. Finally, to make the environment plausible with respect to the users’ tastes, the appearance and the clothes of the human body were accurately designed so as to look similar to those of club-goers. The navigation in Videodope starts by clicking on the related icon; the user selects the human model’s gender and a type of drug among several possible ones: alcohol,

VIDEODOPE: Applying Persuasive Technology

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hallucinogens, amphetamine, cannabis, cocaine, ecstasy, heroin and ketamine. By clicking on the icons surrounding the 3D avatar, the user can see on the right side of the screen a description of the physiological consequences of the selected drug on that organ, as well as the legal and social ones (Figure 1). This exhibition of a cause and effect relation is a well-known persuasive strategy in this kind of educational tools [1].

Fig. 1. The transparent man and woman bodies with the organs icons and the text frame with images and links on the right of the screen

A different background music for each substance was also implemented on the interface. Since this version of the game was meant to be evaluated on the field, we wanted to have comparable sessions across the different users. Therefore, the session had a pre-defined length of at maximum 6 minutes, after which the user was presented with the starting screen, and once selected a certain type of drug it was not possible to go back and change, until the end of the whole session. By pressing the bar on the keyboard, the user could enter the 10 items quiz session. Feedback on the correctness of the answer was provided. (Figure 2). After a usability test on the prototype, conducted within our laboratory with a cognitive walk-through with experts [14] and students, and leading to some adjustments in the questionnaire format, in the layout of the images, and in the variety of the background music, Videodope was ready to be evaluated in the field.

Fig. 2. Two screenshots of a wrong and right answer message in the final session of the game

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3 In-Field Evaluation The purpose of the evaluation was to collect the users’ acceptance of the videogame as an informative tool. It was important to involve target users of Videodope, namely people aged 15 to 24, and to locate the test in a context similar to those in which drug consumption is likely to occur. Therefore, we conducted the evaluation during an Italian music summer festival in 2006 attended by young people. The participants were 49 people (38 males, 11 females) aged 24.7 on average (s.d. 6.32). Our station was located in a tent adjacent to the main stage where it was also possible to get some refreshments, and access the Internet. The equipment consisted of a projector and a big screen, a tablet pc and two amplifiers. The users sat in front of the screen and interacted with the projected digital environment by using mouse and keyboard (Figure 3). The experimenters only intervened in case of need. The participants took one individual sessions with the Videodope environment, with the informative module regarding one drug of their choice and the quiz module. They were explained the goal of the game, its component and its functioning. They were advised that they could stop the informative module and take the quiz earlier. Finally, they were announced that after the game they would have been administered a questionnaire. At the end of the navigation and the quiz session, they were lead to a different table to filled in a 12-items paper and pencil questionnaire. The questionnaire contained items on the credibility of the Videogame, on the perceived completeness of the information provided, on its appeal and usability. The questionnaire also collected socio-demographic information on the respondents and measured their familiarity with Internet, videogames, rave parties and drugs.

Fig. 3. Two scenes from the evaluation with users in the field

4 Results 4.1 Relevance of the Sample Participants were mostly workers or students, with a slight prevalence of the latter, 12 of them hold a university degree, 10 a high school diploma, 26 a college degree. 73%


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of them came from the North of Italy. Their familiarity with drugs is reported in Table 1. The table highlights a prevailing consume of cannabis and alcohol in the sample, since 4.2% of the respondents declared to have never drunk some alcohol and nobody declared to have never tried cannabis. This means that we were able to reach the target. By replacing the 7 points in the Likert scale with numerical values (1= once a week, 7= never), we could compare the familiarity with the different substances in several subgroups. A comparison by age (16/23 versus 24/45) revealed no significant difference, whereas groups divided by occupation had a significant different in familiarity with substances, with students scoring higher (T (40) = 2.37; p = .023). A significant difference was also found in groups divided by familiarity with rave parties: rave-goers, which represented a 58.3% of the sample, declared a consume of drugs higher than the other (T(38) = 2.38; p = .023). Their expertise with Internet was low, and 36% declared that they never used a videogame. The mean score they achieved in the quiz was of 6.7 right answers out of 10. Table 1. Percentages of drug’s consume within participants

Several Once times a a week week

Alcohol Hashish/ Marijuana Cocaine Mushrooms Ecstasy Amphetamine LSD Heroine Other

Once a month

Rarely

Once I in a used life tim e

Never

72.9

16. 7

2.1

0

0

2.1

4.2

62.5

6.3

18.8

4.2

0

8.3

0

4.2

2.1

2.1

10.4

16.

14.

7

6

0

0

4.2

10.4

8.3

6.3

4.2

0

2.1

6.3

4.2

6.3

0

2.1

0

12.5

0

4.2

0

0

2.1

6.3

0

6.3

0

0

2.1

0

2.1

2.1

0.4

0

0.4

5.4

4.6

8

50

Tot.

1 00 1 00 1 00

70.

1

8

00

77.

1

1

00

81.

1

3

00

85.

1

4

00

93.

1

8

00

81.

1

2

00

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4.2 Videodope Relevance and Usability

No velty

Exhaustivenes

Credibilit

Dept

Graphics

Feedbac

Terminol

1 00 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

E

It seemed that Videodope was not taken as a game, since users tried to be informed about situations that resembled their real-life ones: the gender of the videogame was mostly the same of the user and the most selected drugs were cannabis, which as also the most commonly used in the sample (14 people), or hallucinogens. The interest was high, as can be inferred from the fact that 90% of the respondents declared that they would have tried again the environment spontaneously if there were a chance, and almost 70% would have liked to navigate for more sessions in order to find out information about other substances. Regarding credibility, completeness, appeal and usability of the interface, they were investigated by measuring the agreement with some statements on a 5-point Likert scale (1: I agree - 2: I almost agree - 3: I do not agree nor disagree- 4: I disagree a bit- 5: I totally disagree). It seems that the dimensions to which designers paid a special attention were evaluated positively (fig. 4).

I agree I almost agree Not agree nor disagree Barely agree Disagree

Fig. 4. Percentages of evaluation of some Videodope’s dimensions provided by participants

Most respondent agreed that the ‘information seemed credible’ (item 6), which was an essential requisite for Videodope. Regarding the perceived quality of the information provided, a great percentage of agreement was collected for the items investigating the comprehensibility (‘the terminology sued in the game was easy to comprehend’, item 2), exhaustiveness (‘the game provides an exhaustive amount of information’, item 7) and depth of the information (‘Videodope was useful to deepen my knowledge of substances’, item 6). About novelty, a fair part of respondents declared that Videodope matched with what they already knew on the subject (‘the information provided are different from the ones that I already knew’, item 8). This


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may suggest both that the information was plausible to them and that it could have been presented in such a way as to privilege what is not known. A group of items was meant to investigate the usability of the game in terms of effectiveness and satisfaction. Regarding the graphic appearance (‘I was satisfied with the graphic appearance of the game, item 4’), responsiveness (‘to all my action corresponded a good response from the game’, item 3) and ease of finding the information of need (item 1), the agreement was slight lower than with the other aspects but still in the positive half of the scale. The questionnaire concluded by asking for suggestions on the way in which the game could be improved. Respondents mentioned the possibility of introducing a higher amount of images showing the consequences of the substances on the organs, for instance before-and-after the consumption. They also suggested to insert autobiographic narratives from witnesses that can testify of their own experience with heavy abuse of the substances. They also suggested to add more curious information and statistics, to increase its multimediality by inserting videos, and to provide a final score in the quiz, as in the other videogames. Some of them suggested to increase the rhythm and the speed of the game. Ideal locations for Videodope were the Internet (73.5%), secondary schools (69.4%), primary schools (49%) and discos or pubs (24.5%), with people who already use substances as the most recommended target, followed by 'who is willing to try some'.

5 Conclusions The location for the evaluation proved adequate to the purpose of approaching target users. The interest for the game was high and the overall evaluations received by Videodope as a credible, complete and appealing tool were positive. The results of the questionnaire suggest to push even more on the game metaphor to meet the users’ expectations, while at the same time making the information more surprising, visual and multimedial. Making Videodope available over the Internet could be a next step in order to take full advantage of the ubiquity and anonymity of a digital environment.

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