Using video games to improve the sexual health of young people aged 15-25 years: A rapid review

Abstract

Background: Sexually transmitted infections and unintended pregnancies among young people remain a public health concern in many countries. To date, interventions to address these concerns have had limited success. The use of serious games as educational tools is increasingly used in health and public professional education. Although acknowledged as having great potential, fewer studies have evaluated the use of serious games in sexual health education among young people and to date, there have been no published reviews of these studies.
Objective: The aim was to assess the effects of video game-based sexual health interventions for risky sexual behavior in young people aged 15-25 years.
Methods: A rapid review of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and quasi-RCT trials. The search included these bibliographic databases: Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials; Embase; Medline; PsycINFO; Scopus. Two reviewers independently screened 50 percent of the articles retrieved at the full-text screening phase.
Results: From a total of 459 citations identified, after removing duplicates, 327 articles were deemed eligible for title/abstract screening. Seventy full-texts were screened, leaving 10 articles (evaluating 11 different games) included in the review. The findings highlighted the considerable diversity in video game-based interventions and in the sexual health outcomes assessed. While there were some promising findings in outcome studies using game-based interventions, results across studies were mixed.
Conclusions: Although game interventions for sexual health have been in existence for almost three decades, there have been relatively few studies evaluating them and the results of previous outcome studies have been mixed. Moreover, there is little clarity about which specific elements of a game facilitate positive outcomes. We provide some recommendations for future researchers developing video game-based interventions to improve sexual health in young people.
Keywords: Sex education, serious games, sexually transmitted infections, rapid review

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ORCID for Cynthia Graham: orcid.org/0000-0002-7884-599X

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