Engaging and Entertaining Adolescents in Health Education Using LLM-Generated Fantasy Narrative Games and Virtual Agents

Abstract

Games have been successfully used to provide engaging health interventions for adolescents. However, translating health education goals into a playable game has historically taken many person-months of effort, involving game designers, scriptwriters, and artists. This work presents an exploratory study into rapidly developing physician-validated health education games for adolescents using virtual agents and LLMs. We evaluated this approach in an intervention to promote Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination among adolescents, as lack of knowledge and vaccine hesitancy contribute to suboptimal HPV vaccination rates. We conducted a between-subjects randomized study comparing a fantasy narrative game to a non-gamified pedagogical virtual agent, with both interventions conveying the same HPV information. Among our study's 9-12-year-old adolescent participants, our findings demonstrate large pre-to-post improvements in HPV knowledge for both conditions. The gamified intervention showed higher engagement and entertainment than the pedagogical agent based on participant interviews, demonstrating that gamification enriched the educational experience for adolescents.