Can video games help reduce symptoms of mental health conditions?

Can video games help reduce symptoms of mental health conditions?
TECHNOLOGY 29 October 2019


By Jacob Aron

Video games could be used to reduce symptoms of mental health conditions

Klaus Vedfelt/Getty

Could people with mental health conditions one day use video games to help manage their symptoms? It is a question that Tameem Antoniades, creative director of UK games developer Ninja Theory, and Paul Fletcher, a psychiatrist at the University of Cambridge, aim to answer as part of The Insight Project.

The pair previously collaborated on Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, a video game that has won accolades for its portrayal of the experience of psychosis. As they developed the game, they wondered whether video games could also be used to measure and modify people’s mental distress, and have now begun prototyping games based on biometric signals.

“Instead of using a game controller, we are using your physiology,” says Antoniades.

For example, the pair have created a sailing game that reads your pulse. As your heart rate increase, the in-game sea becomes more stormy, slowing down your progress. “People compete on how quickly they can slow their heart rate,” says Antoniades.

The idea of games that respond to physiological signals is nothing new, but they have never had much commercial success in the past – for instance, Nintendo cancelled its plans for a pulse monitoring accessory for the Wii console because it didn’t work reliably.

Read more: Emotional video gaming makes the action real

Fletcher says The Insight Project will be taking a more scientific approach. Rather than just reading a player’s pulse as a single number, he wants to study the waveform in detail.

“People talk about your basic heart rate as being the key signal that determines your state of arousal or anxiety, but actually there is a whole lot more to the heart beat signal than that,” he says.

Cataloguing these biometric signals will allow the team to build games that respond to how the player is feeling, says Antoniades, and perhaps even act as a form of therapy.

“If we know what state of mind they are in, we can create challenges for them to overcome,” he says “By overcoming those challenges, they will effectively learn to control their own biometric signals.”

Although the pair plan for their eventual game to be based on therapeutic processes and to be used in treatment, the goal is to produce a commercially viable game like Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice. “It’s something exciting that people want to play, not something they are forced to play by their therapist,” says Antoniades.

Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2221269-can-video-games-help-reduce-symptoms-of-mental-health-conditions/#ixzz63tK4rA1M