Truth and consequences: Building a game to fight the rural HIV epidemic

UAB researcher Comfort Enah is developing a video game to help high-risk teens and pre-teens
learn vital lessons about HIV prevention. An early graphic concept is shown above.

Comfort Enah, Ph.D., a researcher in the UAB School of Nursing, can't build a time machine to help teens avoid making bad decisions in the future. So she's creating the next best thing: a video game.

Working with a team from the School of Engineering, Enah is crafting a simulation of the challenges of modern teen life—including social media shaming, drug and alcohol use, dating boundaries, and the wildfire spread of misinformation on the Internet. The goal is to slow the HIV epidemic among adolescents in the rural South. Enah's dream, if the game proves effective, is to take it to the even more hard-hit communities of sub-Saharan Africa, where she grew up.

Maturity without Maturity

Over the past century, puberty has been arriving earlier and earlier, which means that “teens are spending longer and longer periods with bodies that are sexually mature and brains that aren't yet capable of anticipating the long-term consequences of their actions,” says Enah, an assistant professor in the Department of Nursing Community Health Outcomes. “They need to practice their responses to those risky situations, and games are a way to do that in private and as often as necessary.”