#18 Paul Irwin: What If There Was a Safer Way to Play Out Youthful Transgressions?
Think back to your youth, to some memorable choices you made. If you're like the majority of people, your teen years were notably ripe with tricky situations. Situations in which the stakes were high, emotions were high, and tough decisions came at you from all sides. Yet what if there was a way to make youthful mistakes without risking such serious consequences? That question lies at the heart of TryLife, and interactive drama that blends the power of media, game theory, and the principles of behavior change.
TryLife was designed by some of the best people from the creative, youth, education and health care industries in which the story is molded and shaped by the user. Like the Choose Your Own Adventure books popular in the '80s and '90s, Trylife places users at the center of the story and relies on their decisions to chart the course of the narrative. Authentic and hard-hitting, the plot routes are based on probability using real stats and data.
In this episode, TryLife creator Paul Irwin discusses TryLife's approach to behavior change and its wild success since its inception.
“Rather than having someone burn the finger and think “I’m not going to do that again”, can we actually bring about an emotional response in a young person’s mind using all of the tools of media?”