Hall of Heroes: A Digital Game for Social Skills Training with Young Adolescents

Abstract

Traditional social skills training (SST) programs are delivered in person and suffer from significant time, financial, and opportunity barriers that limit their reach and potential benefits for youth. This paper describes the design and preliminary evaluation of Hall of Heroes, a digital game that presents SST through an engaging superhero-themed virtual story world. Participants were randomly assigned to complete the digital game (n = 15) or to a waitlist control condition (n = 14) and were compared on parent-report measures of social emotional functioning. Youth who completed Hall of Heroes significantly improved in their abilities to relate to others (both peers and family members) as well as to accept affection and express emotions with others, compared to youth who did not complete the SST intervention. Further, youth in the treatment condition showed a significantly greater decline in feelings of anxiety, depression, and hopelessness than did youth in the control condition. Both parents and youth reported high levels of engagement in and acceptability of the Hall of Heroes. This study adds to the research literature, supporting the potential of a game-based SST platform for effectively helping youth develop prosocial social problem-solving skills.

Serious Games as a Complementary Tool for Social Skill Development in Young People: A Systematic Review of the Literature

“…Similar to reviews of serious games for knowledge acquisition (Boyle et al, 2012;Connolly et al, 2012), in our review of social skill serious games, we also found that many of the RCT studies used non-comparable controls (Bachen et al, 2012;Beaumont et al, 2019;Boduszek et al, 2019;Craig et al, 2016;DeRosier & Thomas, 2019;McMahon & Hanrahan, 2020;Shum et al, 2019). The use of curriculum or wait list controls potentially weakens the significance of the effects, as parents or children may report a placebo effect (Abdul Jabbar & Felicia, 2015;Boyle et al, 2016;.…”

“…Furthermore, unlike the real world, which is often characterized by a no-fail culture (Miller, 2009;Plucker & Makel, 2010;Vallett & Annetta, 2014) games provide a non-threatening context in which players can practice social strategies (Bers & Kazakoff, 2013). Social skill serious games, in particular, may require players to follow social rules to advance in the game, see situations from multiple perspectives, and actively work with other players and in-game characters to solve problems (DeRosier & Thomas, 2019;Hilliard et al, 2018;Nieh & Wu, 2018;Shum et al, 2019).…”

Design of a Digital Game Intervention to Promote Socio-Emotional Skills and Prosocial Behavior in Children

“…More specifically, the application of strength-based digital game interventions in the area of children's socio-emotional skills and prosocial behaviors is still very limited [3,5]. Previous interventions that aim to promote these skills and behaviors in youth have generally done so with school curriculum programs [16,40,41], while only recently, practitioners have started to apply digital games to intervention design [42][43][44][45]. Interestingly, a review by Saleme et al [5] found that a small sample of prosocial digital games showed positive behavioral results, where children transferred skills leaned in digital games into real social interactions, which was measured by observed prosocial behavior outcomes [42][43][44]46].…”

“…Previous interventions that aim to promote these skills and behaviors in youth have generally done so with school curriculum programs [16,40,41], while only recently, practitioners have started to apply digital games to intervention design [42][43][44][45]. Interestingly, a review by Saleme et al [5] found that a small sample of prosocial digital games showed positive behavioral results, where children transferred skills leaned in digital games into real social interactions, which was measured by observed prosocial behavior outcomes [42][43][44]46]. This shows the potential for transferring prosocial skills and behaviors learned in digital environments into real life positive experiences and behaviors [47].…”

Game-Based Socio-Emotional Skills Assessment: A Comparison Across Three Cultures

“…To compare cultural differences in SE skill development in adolescent children, we used a recently developed game entitled Hall of Heroes (DeRosier & Thomas, 2019). Hall of Heroes is a single player, point-and-click, engaging digital game designed to assess SE skills across six domains.…”