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 pair previously collaborated on Hellblade: Senua鈥檚 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鈥檚 mental distress, and have now begun prototyping games based on biometric signals.
鈥淚nstead of using a game controller, we are using your physiology,鈥� says Antoniades.
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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. 鈥淧eople compete on how quickly they can slow their heart rate,鈥� 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 鈥� for instance, Nintendo cancelled its plans for a pulse monitoring accessory for the Wii console because it .
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Fletcher says The Insight Project will be taking a more scientific approach. Rather than just reading a player鈥檚 pulse as a single number, he wants to study the waveform in detail.
鈥淧eople 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,鈥� 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.
鈥淚f we know what state of mind they are in, we can create challenges for them to overcome,鈥� he says 鈥淏y overcoming those challenges, they will effectively learn to control their own biometric signals.鈥�
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鈥檚 Sacrifice. 鈥淚t鈥檚 something exciting that people want to play, not something they are forced to play by their therapist,鈥� says Antoniades.
