Design of a Digital Educational Game for Self-management of Adolescents Living with HIV: Theory and Framework (Preprint)

BACKGROUND The self-management of adolescents living with HIV (ALHIV) plays a pivotal role in enhancing their health quality of life. However, the current self-management practices within this population are suboptimal. Therefore, it is imperative to reinforce HIV self-management education interventions. The advent of digital educational games presents an unparalleled opportunity for innovative educational methods. OBJECTIVE This study designed a digital educational game for self-management of ALHIV, offering an effective educational approach to enhance their self-management skills and facilitate comprehension of HIV self-management practices. METHODS The integrative framework for HIV self-management, empowerment theories, and the learning-game mechanics (LM-GM) model were used as theoretical framework to guide the design of the game system. Experts in diverse fields such as medicine, nursing, psychology, software engineering were consulted for guidance and comments to improve the design of the game. RESULTS The digital educational game was named Cute Pet Butler. The framework of game system consists of five modules, including home page, shop and backpack, story, database, and background management modules. The core module is the story module where players are given tasks to help their pet to solve various HIV self-management problems. CONCLUSIONS The development and sharing of the multidisciplinary theoretical framework adopted by Cute Pet Butler can help us clarify the design ideas and assumptions of digital educational games, understand the ability of educational games to change HIV self-management knowledge, emotion and behaviors, and promote the development of effective educational tools of digital games.