Analysis, Implementation, and Assessment of a Serious Game for Smoking Cessation: Investigating Design and Playtesting Outcomes

Abstract

Smoking cigarettes greatly increases the risk of contracting certain non-communicable diseases (NCDs). In an ongoing effort to support smoking cessation, researchers and healthcare professionals have explored various strategies, including educational campaigns, counseling, and the usage of pharmaceutical aids. Integrating technology, particularly mobile applications and serious games has emerged as a promising avenue to engage and motivate individuals to quit smoking. Serious games, a genre of digital games designed with a primary purpose beyond entertainment, have gained prominence as effective tools for tackling a wide range of real-world challenges, including preventing NCDs. This research focuses on one such innovative approach: a serious game designed to facilitate smoking cessation. It introduces a novel concept where the user’s progress in quitting smoking is integrated into the gaming experience, harnessing the power of gamification to enhance motivation and provide real-time feedback. The subsequent playtest with seven people, which consisted of a short introduction, a playing phase, and a feedback round containing a predefined questionnaire, offered insights into this approach’s effectiveness and highlighted improvement areas by extracting 12 suggested adaptions, ultimately contributing to the ongoing discourse on leveraging technology to combat the global smoking epidemic and subsequently help prevent NCDs.