Abstract
Every day, 3000 adolescents begin smoking.1 The process of nicotine addiction ensures that many of today's adolescent smokers will continue tobacco use into adulthood.1 Although widely publicized health warnings of tobacco have been disseminated, there has been no decrease in adolescent smoking over the last decade.1 Reducing the initiation of cigarette smoking of children and youth by 50% by the year 2000 is one of the nation' health objectives.2 The specific purpose of this exploratory study was to evaluate the appeal of a video-game intervention designed to prevent smoking initiation in preadolescents. Appeal was defined as the extent to which the study subjects expressed interest in the video-game intervention and the desire to continue using the game. Before evaluating the effectiveness of the educational video game as a smoking prevention strategy, it was important to determine the acceptability of this approach to children in the target population. The intervention, a health-hero video game,3 has not been used before in smoking prevention programs. Focus groups were used in which the study participants evaluated the appeal of the video game intervention.4,5