Serious game approach to risk and safety communication strategies: The Good Talk!

Extract from second joint meeting of GACVS and ACSoMP of 14-16 December 2022, published in the WHO Weekly Epidemiological Record of 3 March 2023

Vaccine hesitancy can be due to a misunderstanding of COVID-19, a general mistrust of vaccination, concerns about safety and effectiveness, and the rapid development and evaluation of COVID-19 vaccines, being unaware of the social benefits of vaccination, and logistical or opportunity-related factors. The COVID-19 infodemic showed ‘too much information, including false or misleading information in digital and physical environments during a disease outbreak’, can lead to confusion and loss of trust in health authorities and public health responses and strengthen the hesitancy.[1]

Serious games are designed to be interactive, fun, and entertaining (motivating) as they educate, train, or change players’ behaviour. ‘The Good Talk!’ is an app developed based on the serious game approach to boost vaccine advocates’ skills to have open conversations about COVID-19 vaccination with their close contacts who are vaccine hesitant.[2] This approach can potentially address various reasons for vaccine hesitancy, as well as build transferrable skills that can be applied in other situations by focusing on boosting open conversation skills rather than addressing specific causes of vaccine hesitancy.

‘The Good Talk!’ was developed by the three WHO departments in collaboration with the team from Cambridge Decision Making Laboratory who developed Bad News, Go Viral and Harmony Square games. There are three protagonists in the game, the player, the person being spoken to and the Good Talk Guide, that is the narrator, who explains to the player why the decisions made are good or bad. The game has an introduction and four chapters: Gain trust, Offer support, Open up and Don’t be sad if it doesn’t work out.

In December 2022,[3] the beta version will be hosted on ‘Hive’, a WHO platform for the promotion of reliable information and collaboration. A study is planned early 2023.⁴ to assess the efficacy of the game in increasing open conversation skills, self-efficacy and intentions to initiate conversations about vaccination between vaccine advocates and their vaccine hesitants.

Once the game is finalized, there will be low bandwidth deployment package that can be adapted to the local context by changing the graphics, the text and names, while the methodology remains the same. An evaluation protocol will be part of the download, so that once implemented, it will be possible to evaluate how well the tool is doing in terms of changing peoples’ behaviours in the new setting.

Report of the second joint meeting (hybrid) of the WHO Global Advisory Committee on Vaccine Safety and the WHO Advisory Committee on Safety of Medicinal Products, 14–16 December 2022 (WER 98, No 9)