Abstract:

Since 2016, in response to the national opioid epidemic in Canada, overdose education and naloxone distribution (OEND) have been provided to individuals at high risk of opioid overdose and likely bystanders to prevent overdose deaths. However, implementation barriers (e.g., stigma and high resource requirements for face-to-face education) limit this strategy's potential impact. There are also limitations in the degree to which the target audience will seek out this training. To save lives, we must find effective ways to reach populations where they are to make this lifesaving knowledge both widely available and provided in a practical, user-centred approach that maximizes dissemination.

To address these barriers and potentiate the likelihood that Canadians, when faced with an overdose situation, will be able to intervene successfully, we proposed introducing a serious game (a game whose primary purpose is apart from entertainment) to educate and develop know-how about responding to an opioid overdose. With a modest institutional grant from Canada's Social Science and Humanities Research Council, we embarked on a project consisting of a survey study to gain insight that would inform the development, implementation and evaluation of the Suspected Overdose Serious (SOS) Game. The target audience was post-secondary students, a population at increased risk for opioid overdose.

The team chose Articulate Storyline software to develop the SOS Game. Storyline was chosen because the software licence was budget-friendly and because of the lead researchers' experience using Storyline to create eLearning resources. Developing a serious game using Storyline was a challenging learning experience characterized by an iterative process of identifying gaps in our team's knowledge of the software capabilities and know-how and subsequent revisions to the game design. This presentation will describe the process and lessons learned by the team and provide recommendations for using Articulate Storyline to develop serious games and gamification in education.

Keywords:

Serious Games Design, Serious Games Development, Articulate Storyline, Opioid Epidemic.