VIDEODOPE: applying persuasive technology to improve awareness of drugs abuse effects.

Videodope is an interactive digital environment that is meant to show the short-, medium- and long-run effects of psychoactive substances on the human organism. Its purpose is to increase the users’ knowledge of these effects, which is often based on misconceptions and legends, and to provide a feedback on their level of information, with preventive purposes. These kind of educational games have the advantage of being more persistent, ubiquitous, informative, anonymous and multi-medial than a normal lecture. However, they have to be perceived as credible and plausible to the user in order to be persuasive, especially since the target is constituted of young people familiar both with the technology and with the subject. In this paper, we will describe the process of designing and evaluating the videogame in the field, as well as the insights provided by the participants who took part to the evaluation.