Most everyone understands the concept of the avatar—a physical embodiment of the character. The Aspirational Avatar expands to include the notion of future orientation and what one wants from life. Today’s talk will give you an overview of how we got to this idea and what we have been doing in order to develop the supporting ideas.
We started at a local afterschool program that we were hoping to partner with. This is the Farnam Neighborhood House Established in 1943, the Farnam House is In New Haven It Serves an inner-city at-risk population of kids coming from over 42 New Haven area schools They provide after-school and weekend programs for over 900 youth ages 6 to 18 years.
As we were finishing our tour of Farnam, we came upon this artwork in the basement playroom of the building. Some of the kids had written about what their dreams were and how they envisioned their destiny. (Quote?) This finding lead us to the idea of incorporating these kids’ dreams and strong senses of their destinies into the game character and to expand and evolve the avatar into the concept of the Aspirational Avatar
Good afternoon. Today will talk about several key topics that involve the inspiration, creation, or inclusion of the Aspirational Avatar. First, we will give a quick overview of the HIV Prevention interactive video game that has brought us here today. We will then talk about a new initiative that has been inspired by this research, Play2Prevent, which focuses on the development and evaluation of video games that focus on prevention in at-risk children, teens, and young adults. Next will talk briefly discuss findings from our interviews and focus group discussions with at-risk youth, which provided us with essential insight into their take on future orientation and risk-taking. We will briefly talk about three themes that emerged during our discussions with the youth. And finally, we will talk about how all of this translates into the Aspirational Avatar.
It is clear that young teens (as well as many other age groups) are already engaged in video game play. If this is where they are, then they are a captive audience and our goal is to bring the interventions to them as opposed to requiring them to come to the interventions. Video games have the potential to create engaging and effective methods of teaching skills and conveying information, which can then translate to healthier and safer lives for individuals as they move through early adolescence into young adulthood.
The project that serves as the foundation for this talk today is a five year research project funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to develop and evaluate an interactive video game designed to provide at-risk young teens the opportunity to acquire and practice skills in order to avoid or reduce their risk behaviors. The goal is that this reduction in risk will then translate to preventing new cases of HIV. In general, players will rehearse refusal and negotiation skills that help them to make better decisions in real life.
Play2Prevent™ is a newly-formed initiative to bring together the expertise of a wide array of individuals, including scientists, community leaders, educators, and video game technologists which focus on creating new forms of behavior change games. Our primary goals of these games are to prevent negative health outcomes such as HIV, obesity, or other conditions and behaviors that are of particular concern for these younger age groups and to help at-risk populations obtain the skills and motivation needed to overcome health-related challenges. This initiative has its genesis in the HIV prevention project we are presenting here today, which will debut in 2013 on tablet computers.
As I mentioned earlier, the primary aim of the HIV video game prevention study is to develop and evaluate an interactive video game designed to provide at-risk young teens the opportunity to acquire and practice skills in order to avoid or reduce their risk behaviors which will then translate into preventing new cases of HIV. In general, players will rehearse refusal and negotiation skills that help them to make better decisions in real life, including the delay sexual initiation.
As an important step in the development of our interactive video game, we set out to understand the perspectives and experiences of at-risk youth with regards to their decision making and risk behaviors.
For this project, we did partner with Farnam Neighborhood house and continued our work there conducting both the interviews and the focus groups with these kids.
Information rich – seek participants that are able to express themselves and their experiences well, Farnam staff identified kids
Creating interview guides for focus groups and in-depth interviews is standard qualitative methodology but we decided these youth may best be able to express themselves through more innovative means. To that end, we used a picture to elicit discussions, particularly about future orientation and risk-taking behaviors. We also found several themes in our analysis, of which we will present three today.
As part of our interview, we gave each participant a piece of paper with a horizontal line going across the middle of the page. On the top of the page, the title read, “My Life”. At the beginning of the line we wrote the child’s current age. At the end of the line we wrote the child’s age plus ten years. Next, we asked each child to write down things that he or she wanted or planned to do over the next ten years. After the child was finished, we then asked him or her to tell us about his or her timeline. The purpose of this exercise was to learn more about the children’s perception of their futures, including what the children aspired to do or become over the next ten years of their lives. Several of the children had very specific goals and plans for the future, such as playing in the NBA or becoming a cryptozoologist. Others, however, saw their future as open to many possibilities such as becoming a doctor, hairstylist, or owning their own business (all at once or in succession to each other):
Aside from describing future career ambitions, children described other important plans and goals in their lives that, for the most part, seemed to be as important to them as planning for a future occupation. This included saving money or obtaining a scholarship to be able to go to college. Many children described wanting to help their parents pay bills or to be able to buy them a new home or automobile in the future. For instance, one child explained, “And when I’m 20, I’ll help my mom with bills and stuff, whatever she has to do”.
From our discussions with the youth, we learned that kids are goal-oriented. They had specific goals and plans for their future. However, for most kids, especially the younger ones, the further into the future the children were asked to plan for, the more difficult the task seemed to be in relation to their perception of future and time. Also, goals such as going to college, helping the family, and having financial stability were very important to the kids. However, the kids were really unsure how to reach these goals. From these interviews, we believe that being able to orient to the future is an essential component of our video game experience and must be included.
As a way to elicit discussion on topics such as risk-taking with youth during our focus group meetings, we had a graphic designer create an illustration for us depicting a group of young teens gathered together. After giving the kids a few minutes to look at the picture, we simply asked, “What do you think is going on here?” To keep the conversation focused, when needed, we would prompt with questions such as, “What kind of risky things do you think are happening?” and “What do you think might happen to him or her?” Through the use of the picture, the youth provided us with rich descriptions of topics such as risk-taking, peer pressure, and violence that at times seem to relate to their own lives and situations they have encountered. We were also able to extract “risk-taking scenarios” involving future consequences that came directly from the youth’s narratives. These scenarios, which are presented in their own words, depict risky situations that seem to resonate with the youth.
One theme that we saw was “Self versus the Group”, where many participants described a struggle between preserving the “self” with the need to belong to their group of peers. For some, choosing to make the right choice also meant “making a sacrifice”. This equated to being socially isolated or taunted by others for their decisions.
A second theme that we found was “you need someone to teach you to be successful”. Youth discussed the importance of having others in their lives to teach them important life skills. These essential others were not just role models to the youth, but included the notion of “unconditional love” for them. This included setting limits and boundaries, and perhaps most importantly – having someone to back you up, even when you messed up.
Many youth highlighted the importance of having supportive others in their lives to provide them with guidance and encouragement as well as teach them essential life skills. These valuable others consisted of parents, siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, and teachers. Unlike role models, these essential people in their lives provided the adolescents with a sense of being unconditionally loved. For example:
Youth often described their environment as a major deterrent to succeeding later in life. For instance, as one 13-year old described:
Youth seemed to understand that when people were able to get out of their environment, such as leaving a bad neighborhood, their chances to succeed substantially increased. You cannot control the environment; however, you can control the people you chose to surround yourself with.
Using this compelling data from the interviews and focus groups, the challenge is now to translate it to the Aspirational Avatar.
![My Avatar is My Future: An Avatar System for the Age of Behavioral Change ,[object Object],[object Object],[object Object],[object Object],[object Object],[object Object],Supported by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development grant: R01HD062080](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/gamesforhealthtalksullivanhieftje-110603075435-phpapp01/85/Games-for-health-talk-sullivan-hieftje-1-320.jpg)
