Story Immersion in a Health Videogame for Childhood Obesity Prevention

TLDR

Stories can serve as powerful tools for health interventions, and story immersion is the experience of being absorbed in a narrative. The study investigates whether children are more immersed when game characters resemble them and whether higher immersion levels are associated with better health outcomes. The authors recruited 87 10‑12‑year‑old children of diverse ethnicities to play the health videogame “Escape from Diab,” recorded demographic, immersion, and health outcome data, and performed correlation analyses. Higher story immersion was positively associated with greater fruit and vegetable preference, intrinsic motivation for water, vegetable self‑efficacy, and physical activity self‑efficacy, and ethnic similarity between characters and players amplified immersion and related health outcomes, suggesting that embedding culturally similar protagonists may help motivate children toward obesity‑prevention behaviors.

Abstract

Stories can serve as powerful tools for health interventions. Story immersion refers to the experience of being absorbed in a story. This is among the first studies to analyze story immersion's role in health videogames among children by addressing two main questions: Will children be more immersed when the main characters are similar to them? Do increased levels of immersion relate to more positive health outcomes?Eighty-seven 10-12-year-old African-American, Caucasian, and Hispanic children from Houston, TX, played a health videogame, "Escape from Diab" (Archimage, Houston, TX), featuring a protagonist with both African-American and Hispanic phenotypic features. Children's demographic information, immersion, and health outcomes (i.e., preference, motivation, and self-efficacy) were recorded and then correlated and analyzed.African-American and Hispanic participants reported higher immersion scores than Caucasian participants (P = 0.01). Story immersion correlated positively (P values < 0.03) with an increase in Fruit and Vegetable Preference (r = 0.27), Intrinsic Motivation for Water (r = 0.29), Vegetable Self-Efficacy (r = 0.24), and Physical Activity Self-Efficacy (r = 0.32).Ethnic similarity between videogame characters and players enhanced immersion and several health outcomes. Effectively embedding characters with similar phenotypic features to the target population in interactive health videogame narratives may be important when motivating children to adopt obesity prevention behaviors.