A Narrative Serious Game to Teach Self-Advocacy Skills in Advanced Cancer

Patients with advanced cancer face an onslaught of challenges. Self-advocacy refers to the way patients with cancer ensure their needs and priorities are met in the face of a challenge. The three key dimensions of self-advocacy include: (1) informed decision-making, (2) connected strength, and (3) effective communication. Our research team developed Strong Together, a narrative serious game to teach self-advocacy skills to female cancer survivors. Evidence-based evaluation to optimize serious game features is lacking. We aim to present a novel research protocol to assess the impacts of various game mechanisms of Strong Together (including its aesthetic feedback systems, soft fail states, and third-person perspective as opposed to explicit feedback, hard fail states, and a first-person perspective) embedded within a randomized clinical trial.