Bridging game design and behavioural theory: a serious game framework for childhood obesity awareness

Obesity has become a significant public health concern, particularly among children in Malaysia and globally. It is driven by sedentary lifestyles, unhealthy dietary patterns, and persistent misconceptions that excess weight is merely cosmetic, underscoring the need for engaging, developmentally appropriate health-promotion interventions. Serious games have emerged as a promising approach to promote obesity awareness and encourage healthy lifestyle habits. This study aimed to bridge game design and behavioural theory by proposing a structured, reusable serious game framework to promote obesity awareness among children, addressing gaps in existing interventions that are often single-domain and insufficiently grounded in behaviour change theory and robust evaluation. The research methodology consists of three phases: problem identification, solution design, and evaluation. In the first phase, a literature review and expert interviews were conducted to identify the research problem. The second phase involved the construction of a serious game framework based on a review of existing frameworks, models, and game elements, followed by an expert review to initialvalidate the proposed framework. The final phase focused on the development of a game prototype based on the framework and an experimental study to validate and evaluate its effectiveness in promoting obesity awareness. The framework was anchored in the Information-Motivation-Behavioural Skills (IMB) model and operationalised through systematic extraction and synthesis of components from established game frameworks and models, while game elements were organized using Werbach and Hunter’s taxonomy (components, mechanics, dynamics). Expert review informed iterative revision, yielding a refined IMB-based framework with explicit mappings between game context (information), motivational design, behavioural skill support, and intended outcomes. A corresponding prototype, FitFuel Frenzy, was developed to embed obesity-related knowledge, nutrition and physical activity emphasis. Evaluation with children aged 7–18 assessed usability, player experience, and perceived learning, supported by reliability analysis, descriptive statistics, and correlation analysis among quality domains. The study concludes that a theory-driven, taxonomically structured framework can guide coherent serious game design for childhood obesity awareness and provides a practical foundation for designers, educators, and researchers, while highlighting needs for larger samples and longitudinal assessment of sustained behaviour change and real-world lifestyle outcomes.