https://goo.gl/aPSWR4Putting art on an equal footing with science when designing video games for mental health
Five years ago, I began following the crumbs of my discontent towards a radically new vision of mental health interventions. When I say “radical,” this is not hyperbole in the field of psychological science. Radical does mean genuinely novel and in stark contrast to the status quo. I started asking myself: Could approaching mental health interventions from an art and design perspective increase our impact on young people’s emotional wellbeing rather than sticking strictly to manualized therapy protocols?
As psychologists become interested in using games as cognitive training tools, there seems to be a naive assumption that building good games is easy, that it’s just a matter of recruiting the 20-year-old Python programmer down the hall and “POOF!” a beautiful game. I was one of those naive psychologists. Now I understand how much more than a good idea and a few programmers it takes to build a powerful game experience.
In the
previous post in this series, I laid out some of the scientific rationale behind using video games for mental health. Now, I want to be clear that there are equally important artistic, aesthetic elements that drive my work. The impact of art on our emotional states and mental health is notoriously hard to quantify, but its transformative properties have been part of human experiences for millenia. Yet art is summarily dismissed in my day-to-day, data-driven world of psychological science. I’ve come to believe we are missing an enormous opportunity to innovate and improve outcomes when we stick exclusively to designing games around cognitive-behavioural principles.
We want to know about the emotional arc experienced by our players, what design elements keep them playing, what game elements touch them most deeply, how compelled players are to share these experiences, what narratives transfer outside of the game, how relevant these game experiences are within young people’s rapidly shifting digital landscape, and so on.
More than just preventing anxiety and depression, we’re aiming to delight, inspire, motivate and socially connect our users. To design for these goals, we need
much more than the conventional cognitive-behavioural toolbox of techniques. The designers and artists we’re working with are teaching us about this “
much more.” And although these elements are harder to quantify than behavioural science techniques, they hold enormous promise for triggering genuine emotional and cognitive change.