INFLUENZA: A Board Game Design Experiment on Vaccination

Abstract

Introduction. Experts on vaccine hesitancy recommend tailoring interventions to local contexts, which presents an opportunity for game-based interventions to reflect local demographics and make them central to the experience of the game. Experimental game design is a research method that has already been used in educational games. Board games are relevant to the topic of vaccination, and present possibilities for game design of openness and flexibility. INFLUENZA was an experimental game design with the objectives of designing a vaccination-themed educational board game where: an aspect of local context was highly-relevant but also easily modifiable, means of emotional engagement were explored, and openness and flexibility in board game design were explored. Methods. The experimental game design study consisted of finding design solutions for achieving the study objectives in a single game, by analyzing comparable games and using iteration and two stages of live testing with players. Results. The game reflects national census data in a highly-relevant but also easily modifiable aspect of play (first objective). The game features aspects of personification to foster emotional engagement (second objective). The game is well-suited to changing the number of players, or allowing mediated play (third objective). Discussion. INFLUENZA has achieved each of its study objectives from an experimental game design perspective. Relevant features of educational games are theme, mechanics, and their integration, and the design experimentation in INFLUENZA follows this trend. Future work is running comparative trials of features of INFLUENZA, as well as measuring the impact of different local adaptations of INFLUENZA.

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“…Hands-on activities are effective in improving various student skills, such as student achievement (Susantini et al, 2019), student scientific attitude (Dewi et al, 2020), and student quantitative literacy (Mukagihana et al, 2021;. In addition, lab methods allow students to connect observable objects and domains with the mind domain (Lauridsen et al, 2019;Neves et al, 2021) by building different psychomotor skills, higher-order reasoning, and characterizing learning outcomes (Xue et al, 2022). Human resources must possess skills that can be raised through this experimental activity in the 21st century (ND Safitri et al, 2023;Rasoolimanesh et al, 2022;Sah et al, 2023;Song et al, 2016).…”