Designing Games for Emotional Health (original) (raw)

Emotional Health Designing Games for Emotional Health

Key Summary Points There is a growing understanding of key skills that can help individuals better manage emotions to improve well-being, such as emotional understanding, executive functioning, and emotion regulation skills. In promoting emotional health, games can operate at the low-order brain training level (e.g., drill-and-skill), as well as the higher order meaning-making level. Emotional health is broad, and efficacious approaches to skills development in emotional health are highly contextual, taking into account expected outcomes, environmental context, and individual psychometric conditions.

Affective Gaming in Education, Training and Therapy

Multidisciplinary Approaches

Games are being increasingly used for educational and training purposes, because of their unique ability to engage students, and to provide customized learning and training protocols. In addition, games are being developed for health-related education and training, for cognitive and motor rehabilitation, and, more recently, for psychotherpy. Emotion plays a central role in learning, in the training of new cognitive and affective skills, and in the acquisition of new behaviors and motor skills, as well as in the eliminations of undesirable behaviors (e.g., addictions). This chapter discusses how the emerging discipline of affective gaming contributes to the design of more engaging and effective educational and training games, by explicitly integrating emotion into the gameplay. It focuses on the contributions from affective computing, and emphasizes the important role of emotion modeling. Emotion modeling is relevant both for modeling emotions in game characters, to enhance their bel...

GameTeen: New Tools for Evaluating and Training Emotional Regulation Strategies

Studies in health technology and informatics, 2012

The aim of this paper is to describe GameTeen, a novel instrument for the assessment and training of Emotional Regulation (ER) strategies in adolescent population. These new tools are based on the use of 3D serious games that can be played under different settings. The evolution of ER strategies will be monitored in two ways depending on the setting where the tool is presented. Firstly, in the laboratory, physiological signals and facial expressions of participants will be recorded. Secondly, in real life settings, ecological momentary assessment tools will be used to obtain answers from the subjects using their mobile phone. The goal is to obtain more attractive and reliable tools to evaluate and train ER strategies.

Board Games on Emotional Competences for School-Age Children

Games for Health Journal, 2020

Objective: Emotional competences (EC) are important for social and academic outcomes and positive life trajectories. Due to their social setting and tendency to stimulate intrinsic motivation, board games may constitute efficient learning tools for promoting socioemotional development in children. The current project therefore aimed at developing and testing three theory-driven board games explicitly targeting EC. First, we explored the quality of these EC games in terms of game experience, compared to off-the-shelf games (without an EC focus). Second, we tested whether targeted EC were linked to game experience in the EC games by measuring associations between children's trait EC and subjective effort and difficulty during gameplay. Materials and Methods: Children (N = 177) aged 8-12 years old were randomly assigned to a four-session protocol that comprised EC board games (experimental group) or off-the-shelf board games (control group). At baseline, participants' trait EC (emotion recognition, differentiation, and cognitive reappraisal) were assessed, while game experience (e.g., positive and negative affect, flow and immersion, difficulty, and effort) was assessed after each game. Results: Both groups perceived the games they played as positive and playable. Furthermore, regression analyses showed that higher trait EC was linked to lower self-reported effort and difficulty in two of the EC board games focusing on emotion recognition and differentiation. Conclusion: The present study shows that the board games on EC designed for children seem to elicit game experiences comparable to off-the-shelf games. Moreover, children's trait EC were linked to subjective game experience in two of the three games. Future interventions should examine the potential of the novel games to promote EC.

Playing for the thrill and skill. Quiz games as means for mood and competence repair

Media Psychology, 2018

Recent studies have found that digital games can be used to improve the players' mood, especially after emotionally unpleasant experiences. We introduce competence repair as an extension of previous work on mood repair. To investigate the effects of digital games on both mood and competence repair, we conducted 3 studies using quiz games. In the quasiexperimental Study 1 (N = 143), we manipulated the necessity for repair via a false feedback task (positive vs. negative), and looked at the impact of in-game success (victory vs. defeat). In the experimental Studies 2 (N = 91) and 3 (N = 109), we aimed at conceptually replicating and extending the findings on the impact of in-game success by varying participants' success over a series of 4 matches (Study 2: close game outcomes, Study 3: clear victory/defeat). The results of these studies indicate that the efficacy of digital games for mood repair, as well as competence repair, depends on the necessity for repair, as well as success in the game. However, competence repair occurred even after participants were defeated repeatedly in a series of close matches. These results are discussed in light of the potential of digital games for fulfilling (previously thwarted) psychological needs. Helping people to cope with their daily life is at the heart of numerous products of human culture, including modern entertainment technology (Slater, Johnson, Cohen, Comello, & Ewoldsen, 2014; Vorderer, 2001). One common use of (entertainment) media is the self-regulation of affective or cognitive states. In this context, digital games are typically considered effective for reducing unpleasant affective or cognitive states (such as disappointment or worry; Villani et al., 2018) or fulfilling (previously thwarted) basic needs (such as the need for competence or autonomy as defined by self-CONTACT Kevin Koban

Designing and Utilizing Biofeedback Games for Emotion Regulation

Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2016

Biofeedback games have the potential to make gaming a deeply personal experience by linking the gamespace to each player's physiological state. First, this paper describes the psycho-educational potential of the horror-themed biofeedback game Nevermind. In Nevermind, players' heart rate is continuously read into the game which in turn adapts to the player's momentary levels of negative affective arousal. Greater negative arousal causes the game and its horrorthemed settings to become more disturbing. As a result, Nevermind challenges players to improve their emotion regulation skills by encouraging them to healthily down-regulate their negative affective states in the face of stressful situations. Second, we share how Nevermind implements two valuable design principles to maximize player engagement. Finally, we describe a recent study conducted on 47 players. We discuss potential physiological metrics which may be useful for understanding how behaviors in the real world relate to those in biofeedback games like Nevermind.

A game for emotional regulation in adolescents: The (body) interface device matters

Computers in Human Behavior, 2016

The aim of this study is to evaluate the role of the type of interface device in the efficacy of a serious game that teaches emotional regulation (ER) strategies in a non-clinical sample of adolescents. We conducted a between-participants experiment in which participants (N ΒΌ 61) played a frustration induction game, and then an ER game (a breathing strategy game), using one of three types of devices (computer, smartphone, and RGB-D camera). Frustration mood and perceived arousal were the main variables measured. Results revealed a significant interaction between moment (pre-induction phase, post-induction phase, and regulation phase) and the type of interface device used in the frustration mood scores. In participants who used the computer and smartphone, frustration increased after the induction phase and decreased after the regulation phase. However, for participants who used the RGB-D camera, frustration decreased significantly after the induction phase, and this change was maintained after the regulation phase. Changes in arousal were similar with the three devices. This study highlights that the type of interface device (and specifically, the participation of the body) is a crucial variable in the efficacy of serious games affecting users' emotional experience.

The Aiming Game: Using a Game with Biofeedback for Training in Emotion Regulation

2012

This paper discusses the development of the Aiming Game, a serious game intended to be used as a tool for training emotion regulation. The game is part of an intervention package designed to support training of financial investors in becoming aware of their emotional states as well as providing them with a toolbox which can be used for training to counteract cognitive biases which may interfere with their trading activities. The paper discusses how such a game can be implemented as well as how it can be effectively evaluated. The evaluation is mostly focused on the effectiveness of the induction of emotional arousal by the game, which is supported by standardized game design methods and patterns.