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Promoting Healthy Adolescent Lifestyles Through Serious Games: Enacting a Multidisciplinary Approach

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Serious Games and Edutainment Applications

Abstract

Long-term health risks associated with unhealthy lifestyles present a significant current and future burden for healthcare providers. Adolescence represents a critical time for intervention, as habits formed during this period can persist throughout adult life. Given the prevalence of gaming as an entertainment medium amongst adolescents, and subsequent potential for engagement, the use of serious games to promote changes in lifestyle behaviour offers a potential solution. Creating such games requires a breadth of multidisciplinary expertise, working collaboratively to create research-informed designs which reflect both behavioural theory and entertainment game design best practices. In this chapter, challenges and benefits associated with multidisciplinary design are identified and discussed, with strategies presented to overcome and avoid potential issues. With reference to a current project, the perspectives of the theorist, iterative designer, and game developer are contrasted, providing a reference for future projects implementing multidisciplinary approaches to serious game design.

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Acknowledgements

This work has been part supported by the European Commission under the collaborative project PEGASO (“Personalised Guidance Services for Optimising Lifestyle in Teenagers”) funded by the European Commission under the Seventh Framework Programme, FP7-ICT-2013-10.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Engineering, Environment, and Computing, Coventry University, Coventry, UK

    Ian Dunwell & Kim C. M. Bul

  2. School of Medicine, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK

    Laura A. Condon & Neil S. Coulson

  3. Human Factors Research Group, Faculty of Engineering, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK

    Alexandra R. Lang & Sarah Atkinson

  4. UCL Centre for Behaviour Change, University College London, London, UK

    Emily Collins

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    Minhua Ma

  2. College of Science and Technology, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, United Kingdom

    Andreas Oikonomou

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Dunwell, I. et al. (2017). Promoting Healthy Adolescent Lifestyles Through Serious Games: Enacting a Multidisciplinary Approach. In: Ma, M., Oikonomou, A. (eds) Serious Games and Edutainment Applications . Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51645-5_15

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