Health and Video Games

Health care is an ever-expanding industry so it makes sense that the world of games and health will intersect.

For an introduction to the complexities of health care in the developed world and how we can start seeing how games can impact it watch this keynote by Ben Swayer at the most recent Games for Health – Europe conference.

General care

When it comes to general care there have been some attempts like WiiFit that brought the idea of games connected to health to the mainstream. The connection between professional game designers and health care practitioners can better bridge the divide between for-profit and for-health care. The ideal is people play games that are fun in itself, and it just so happens that the games are about (or for) healthy living.

Wii Fit in action:

There’s also games that help people stay fit through activity:

Zombies, Run is perhaps the best example of this:

Fitocracy a gaming-inspired approached to an online community about staying fit by being active.

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

Here’s a good video summary from an excellent New Yorker article on how PTSD is treated using virtual environments.

Games for research

Foldit is the most popular example of a game that uses players to research solutions that computers can’t solve. This game focus on the complexity of protein folding.

Phylo is another example of a game that uses the players of the game to compute complex information. The players assemble sequences of DNA for success!

*It’s also worth noting that health games and serious games (education) have a lot in common but I feel that is covered enough elsewhere on this blog.



March 16th, 2012 by admin

Tetris Can Help People Deal With Trauma

This post is copied and pasted from Things Are Good:

Playing games is tons of fun and enterprising people are finding ways to better humanity through gameplay. I just found out that Tetris can be used to help people deal with traumatic experiences – cool!

Research tells us that there is a period of up to six hours after the trauma in which it is possible to interfere with the way that these traumatic memories are formed in the mind. During this time-frame, certain tasks can compete with the same brain channels that are needed to form the memory. This is because there are limits to our abilities in each channel: for example, it is difficult to hold a conversation while doing maths problems.

The Oxford team reasoned that recognising the shapes and moving the coloured building blocks around in Tetris competes with the images of trauma in the perceptual information channel. Consequently, the images of trauma (the flashbacks) are reduced. The team believe that this is not a simple case of distracting the mind with a computer game, as answering general knowledge questions in the Pub Quiz game increased flashbacks. The researchers believe that this verbal based game competes with remembering the contextual meaning of the trauma, so the visual memories in the perceptual channel are reinforced and the flashbacks are increased.

Read more at the University of Oxford.
Hat tip to Reddit.



March 12th, 2012 by admin

Mental Gymnastics in StarCraft 2

Mark Blair is doing something really cool: he’s looking into why some people are better at StarCraft than others. He’s started an academic analysis (with a lot of other people) of what’s going on in the brains of StarCraft 2 players in a project aptly called SkillCraft.

The future seems bright for StarCraft players as they may well be ready-trained for helping emergency services. From SkillCraft’s information website:

It appeared to us that RTS games provide a unique opportunity to better understand the cognitive processing involved in dynamic real-time resource management scenarios. Current interfaces for emergency management information systems (including both those in use and those under development) are not that different from the StarCraft 2 GUI.

Why StarCraft you ask? Well it’s one complicated game that requires so much knowledge of how the game works on every level from units to production rates. Toss in the fact that there are multiple species and you can basically control everything with hotkeys and you have a game so complex that RTS players of yore would be like a deer in headlights.

Here’s a capture of Prime Clan in a recent battle against Team Fnatic. (non-English commentary):

Team Prime vs Team Fnatic @ Korean…

In this Scientific American article about how games are changing psychological analysis, Blair explains:

“I can’t think of a cognitive process that’s not involved in StarCraft,” says Mark Blair, a cognitive scientist at Simon Fraser University. “It’s working memory. It’s decision making. It involves very precise motor skills. Everything is important and everything needs to work together.”

The article goes on to mention that the notion that gamers are only good at a game and don’t (or can’t) apply that skill set elsewhere is incorrect.

Early results suggest that gamers may have faster visual reaction times, enhanced visuomotor coordination, and heightened ability to visualize spatial arrangements. They may also be better at rotating an object in their minds and may distinguish more deftly between the trajectories of moving objects. Players might also have an edge when paying attention to several objects at once.

The world of using games as a tool to improve our understanding of our brains works is growing as is our ability to understand what gaming means to the brain. At the very least we may get even better, faster, stronger(?), StarCraft players.



March 6th, 2012 by admin

Ever Lost Your Sense of Time While Playing Games?

Anybody who’s played the Civilization series knows that it’s possible to lose one’s sense of time while playing a game. In fact, games themselves are good at removing a sense of time by design. Level designers rely on the ability to mess with our perception of time. Heck, I’m not going to lie, I lost track of time playing a few casual games too. I digress, the point is that it’s easy to lose our temporal connection to the world around us thanks to games.

How we understand time is based on our time perception which can be altered in various ways and understood in others. Our understanding of time can be influenced by everything from how hungry we are to what language you speak.

This video is here so the block of text appears more welcoming. It’s the first music video that I saw when searching time on YouTube.

Things get more messed up when physicists look at time because some of them conclude that it all might be an illusion. How very zen.

A very interesting thing happens when we combine the social and the natural sciences, and this is evidenced in how we loose track of time while playing video games.

After analyzing the data, the researcher found that time perspective was indeed connected and related to how frequently someone plays video games. Specifically, that “larger amounts of playing time correlates with lower level of future time perspective and higher levels of present time perspective — especially present fatalistic.”
…

Present fatalistic is connected with dissatisfaction, aggression, and depression. We could hypothesize that people who spend significant time playing develop the present fatalistic orientation.

However, it is more likely that people who already are present fatalistic play more, because playing helps to decrease their negative feelings. This would support Yee’s suggestion that extensive playing is an indicator of mood management.

Source paper:

Lukavska, K.. (2011). Time Perspective as a Predictor of Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game Playing. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking. doi:10.1089/cyber.2011.0171.



March 5th, 2012 by admin

The World of Over-Achieving Gamers

Achievements in video games are like crack for some people. There are multiple reasons why people fall prey to the amazing seductive powers of being rewarded. Some people love being rewarded and some people just love getting a game 100% complete; whatever the reasons I find it fascinating how effective they are at encouraging the player.

One thing that always catches me off-guard no matter how I often I look into the world of achievements is how many people are dedicated to collecting them all.

Here’s a short list of some places dedicated to collecting information on achievements:

Feel free to leave more achievement related resources in the comments

We mustn’t forget that as fascinating as the world of unlockable achievements are they may be harmful than good.

The image is from the fun meta-game Achievement Unlocked 2.



February 22nd, 2012 by admin
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