Hayeon Song, an assistant professor of communication at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, has created a video game named "Super Smoky" that shows social smokers what they would look like in 20 years in an attempt of persuade them to quit smoking.
It is very difficult to get a person to stop smoking. However, a video game named "Super Smoky", created by Hayeon Song, an assistant professor of communication at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, that gives social smokers a peak into the future may be successful in doing the trick. The video game shows social smokers what they would look like in 20 years if they continued smoking.
The study revealed that smokers who were shown their future smoke ravaged features in the video game were interested in quitting smoking than smokers who hadn't used the video game yet. Song reveals that her inspiration to develop this video game and conduct this research came from her interest in human behavior and computers.
"My research area is using virtual reality to change real-life behaviors," Song said in a press release. "Everybody knows smoking is bad, but still they smoke."
The biggest challenge nowadays is making the youth of today aware of the consequences of smoking . Talks seem to have little or no impact, Song explains. In spite of leading studies stating time and again that smoking is the leading cause of preventable health problems in the U.S., the author of the study reveals that according to her, most people continue smoking because they live under the misconception that such health problems caused by smoking won't affect them.
For her study, Song chose "social smokers" because most college students who smoke fall into this category. Such smokers are less addicted to smoking and smoke only when stressed or at a bar or when their friends are smoking. They usually don't carry a pack of cigarettes with them but never say no to one when offered. After screening 400 social smokers in an online survey, she chose 62 of them for the study. They were first educated about the negative aspects of smoking and then divided into four groups:
- those who played with an avatar representing their own future self,
- those who played with an avatar of their current selves,
- those who played with a generic present-time avatar and
- those who played with a generic future-time avatar
The rules of the game were that if a participant using his own face on the avatar couldn't successfully avoid smoking in Level 1; he progressed to his own future, smoking-aged avatar faces, in Level 2.
After playing the game, the participants were asked about their attitude towards smoking and researchers found that participants who had successfully finished the game without seeing their future face were less interested to quit smoking than participants who saw what they would look like in 20 years if they didn't avoid smoking.
The study is published in Computers in Human Behavior.
