title: Game playbooks: tools to guide multidisciplinary teams in developing videogame-based behavior change interventions.
abstract: As mobile technologies and videogaming platforms are becoming increasingly prevalent in the realm of health and healthcare, so are the opportunities to use these resources to conduct behavioral interventions. The creation and empirical testing of game style interventions, however, is challenged by the requisite collaboration of multidisciplinary teams, including researchers and game developers who have different cultures, terminologies, and standards of evidence. Thus, traditional intervention development tools such as logic models and intervention manuals may need to be augmented by creating what we have termed "Game Playbooks" which are intervention guidebooks that are created by, understood by, and acceptable to all members of the multidisciplinary game development team. The purpose of this paper is to describe the importance and content of a Game Playbook created to aide in the development of a videogame intervention designed specifically for health behavior change in young teens as well as the process for creating such a tool. We draw on the experience of our research and game design team to describe the critical components of the Game Playbook and the necessity of creating such a tool.
authors.affiliation: Department of Kinesiology and Physical Education, McGill University, 475 Pine Ave, West, Montreal, Quebec H2W 1S4 Canada ; play2PREVENT Lab, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT USA.
authors.forename: Lindsay R
authors.initials: LR
authors.lastname: Duncan
authors.affiliation: Department of Internal Medicine, University School of Medicine, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520 USA ; play2PREVENT Lab, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT USA.
authors.forename: Kimberly D
authors.initials: KD
authors.lastname: Hieftje
authors.affiliation: Schell Games, 313 E Carson St. No. 200, Pittsburgh, PA 15203 USA.
authors.forename: Sabrina
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Culyba
authors.affiliation: Department of Internal Medicine, University School of Medicine, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520 USA ; play2PREVENT Lab, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT USA.
authors.forename: Lynn E
authors.initials: LE
authors.lastname: Fiellin
keywords: Behavior change; Intervention; Intervention manual; Videogame