What is it about?
General anxiety is a widespread mental health issue, but many people face barriers accessing and adhering to treatments. Story-led game experiences present an effective and engaging way to help manage anxiety, but there is still a lot to learn about the design of these games. We looked at walking simulator games, a type of virtual exploration game with strong narrative qualities, to explore new design strategies for creating therapeutic play experiences. Drawing on clinicians as informants, the study identifies key game design features that could make games useful as anxiety interventions.
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Why is it important?
The clinician led design recommendations provide new knowledge to develop games for anxiety with fresh perspectives that leverage virtual environmental exploration and story-led games. These design insights generate opportunities to support players through therapeutic experiences and harness core game elements from commercial games that could help manage anxiety in a personalized, fun and engaging way. These design findings offer opportunities for intervention studies in the broader mental health sphere and provide preliminary findings in shaping healthcare frameworks on wellbeing games.
Perspectives
Given that commercial games have a unique capacity for greater adherence, this research can contribute towards a pathway of emerging interactive technologies that combine accessibility, impact and efficacy in entertaining ways. This paper offers a foundation that can potentially diversify digital health design and therapeutic game experiences that can improve people's wellbeing through play.
Mr Cristobal Catalan
University of York
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Storytelling Games for General Anxiety: Clinician Perspectives on Walking Simulator Games as Intervention, Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, October 2024, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3677104.
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