A Video Game to Teach Young Adults the Brain Basics of Addiction

This study by Andrés Felipe Reyes of Brainwit Studios in Bogotá, Colombia, asks whether a video game can teach young adults the basic synaptic neuroscience underlying drug action and addiction. The motivation is the persistent difficulty of reducing drug-related harm among young people, alongside expert opinion that understanding addiction's biological basis can improve individual decision-making. The author developed "You VS Drugs," a 3D action-adventure game for PC and mobile in which players follow neurotransmitters across a synapse, with outcomes shaped by the player's answers to embedded knowledge questions.

The evaluation involved 340 volunteers aged 18 to 25, recruited largely through university and personal networks and tested online between March 2021 and March 2022 during the COVID-19 pandemic. Participants watched roughly 80 minutes of game content and answered seven questions in real time, five multiple-choice and two true/false, about neurotransmitter function, receptor binding, and reuptake failure. Participants averaged 5.644 correct answers (about 80.6%), significantly above a simulated random-guessing group averaging 2.579 (about 36.8%), with a large effect size. No differences emerged across age groups or socioeconomic strata.

The study is a single-arm, short-term assessment without a control condition or long-term retention test, and the author acknowledges that the choice of evaluated concepts is partly subjective. The work focuses on acetylcholine as an introductory example, with plans to extend the saga to other neurotransmitters, environmental factors, and younger adolescents.