The design, development and assessment of an educational sports-action video game: Implicitly changing player behaviour

Candidate: Chad Ciavarro
Type: Master of Science (MSc), School of Interactive Arts and Technology
Date: December 12, 2005
Senior Supervisor: Mike Dobson
Thesis: Download Thesis Document

Abstract

Concussion education and prevention for youth hockey players has been an issue of recent concern amongst sport medicine practitioners and hockey's administrative bodies. This thesis details the design, implementation and assessment of a sports-action hockey video game that aims to reduce the aggressive and negligent behaviours that can lead to concussions. The game, termed Heads Up Hockey, was designed to modify game playing behaviour by embedding an implicit teaching mechanism within the gameplay. Educational games often suffer from the problem of indirection, that is, the content the learner is intended to learn is indirectly related to the gameplay. With Heads Up Hockey, participants were expected to learn by simply playing to win, in contrast to playing to learn. The 21 participants in the experimental learning group significantly improved their mean score on a composite behaviour indicator (p = 0.0002) compared with no significant change amongst the 21 control group participants