This year´s Games for Change Europe Festival,
held June 15-16 at the CNAM Museum in Paris, France, dedicated a series of
talks to games that promote emotional and physical health.
According to G4C organizers, studies suggest that
intuitive interfaces, virtual reality and compelling game design will soon help
shape new therapeutic methods in tackling society´s health challenges on a
broader scale.
Isabela Granic, CEO of The PlayNice Institute,
presented MindLight,
a Serious Game aimed at 8-16 year old children that suffer from anxiety
disorders.
Anxiety is the most
prevalent form of children's mental health problems and demand far exceeds
treatment availability. Even when children do have access to care,
evidence-based treatments such as cognitive-behavioral therapy have several
limitations: they are largely didactic, leaving children unmotivated and
disengaged; children get little practice in using the skills they are taught,
creating a large gap between their knowledge and their everyday behavior and
therapy is costly, often prohibitive for the children that most need it.
Therapeutic video
games can address each of these gaps: they are engaging contexts through which
children practice skills (rather than memorize lessons), and they cost
substantially less than conventional approaches.
MindLight incorporates several evidence-based strategies including relaxation and
exposure techniques, attention bias modification methods, and neurofeedback
mechanics that together produce an immersive game world through which children
learn to manage and overcome anxiety symptoms. It is a result of the collaboration
between The PlayNice Institute, with its ongoing
research program in partnership with the Developmental Psychopathology Department
at Radboud University Nijmegen, and game developers at GainPlay Studio, who are pioneering
the creation of biofeedback games for impactful play.
Players wear a
neurofeedback headset, NeuroSky’s MindWave, that measures their level of relaxation or anxiety
and that information is incorporated into key features of gameplay.
The
innovative navigation and interface concept of MindLight uses players’ neurofeedback
Developers’ working
hypothesis is that after many intense experiences of remaining calm in
threatening situations, children develop healthier habits of mind. They learn
to manage their distressing emotions through immersive, engaging gameplay. They
believe that it is this in-game practice that canalizes new neural pathways and
these new pathways may be the means by which playing MindLight forms resilient
habits of mind that transfer to children’s everyday lives.
The PlayNice
Institute’s ongoing research program has been testing these hypotheses through
systematic randomized controlled trials and carefully controlled experiments.
Have a taste of it
at https://youtu.be/TUjmDYw8I1A
Harnessing Player’s Calm To Bring Light Back To The World
In the game, Little Arthur is left on the doorstep
of a scary mansion by his parents. He finds a glowing headset that introduces
himself as Teru, the Magical Hat, and warns Arthur that his grandmother has
succumbed to shadows. Only Arthur, with the help of the Hat, can bring her
back. But to do this, first Arthur must learn to use his own powerful mind to
overcome his greatest fears. Through simple (at first) puzzles and relaxation
techniques, Teru teaches him how to use his “MindLight.” Through these lessons
and increasingly difficult puzzles and “fear events”, players learn that they
can overcome their fear and anxiety by tapping into the power of their own
mind.
The
more relaxed/meditative the player becomes, the brighter his “MindLight” shines
Using the neurofeedback
headset to play the game, the environment, threats and puzzles all respond to
how the player is allocating his/her attention and, thus, how he/she is
feeling. Relaxation allows for a light bubble to shine on the surroundings and
focused concentration unlocks hiding spaces and allows the player to solve
attention bias modification puzzles
About GainPlay Studio
Based in Utrecht the Netherlands and formerly known
as Dreams of Danu, GainPlay Studio creates Serious Games
that incorporate biofeedback from a user centered point of view. They use bio-
and neurofeedback to help them understand players and find fitting solutions to
design challenges. Using real-time emotional and cognitive feedback we refine
games towards our goals to deliver a motivating and insightful gameplay
experience.
About The PlayNice
Institute
The PlayNice Institute is a non-profit
organization that focuses on the design and development of games that promote
emotional resilience through skills acquired while children are immersed in
games they love to play. The PlayNice Institute promotes a radical shift in
mental health approaches for children through game-based interventions as the
“next generation” solutions.