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Could New Vegas, FO:3, or Skyrim be used as a tool to help the mentall


misterhamtastic

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http://psychescircuitry.wordpress.com/2013/07/11/the-game-doesnt-care-why-the-gamification-of-mental-health-isnt-working-yet/

 

This blog is an interesting read. Apparently, shrinks are trying to make games to help people, but their games suck. How hard would it be to mod this sort of thing into the game?

 

Any mental health people out there? What sorts of info would you need?

 

I'm going to link this back to the comment section of the guy's blog. I wonder if Obsidian or Bethesda would be interested in this sort of thing.

 

Thoughts?

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From what I understood-there would need to be some kind of record's you could carry to a shrink or something, maybe an output data file of decisions made. The stipulation would be that the person would have to legitimately roleplay as themselves.

 

Quests which have strongly positive effects for "good" choices and strongly negative effects for "bad" choices could be used to help people work with their illness. Maybe some kind of "self-talk" system, where it asks what you think of a person you are dealing with, or how you would deal with a situation. Like this: "What do you want to do with Joe Cobb?" Possible responses:"Kill him and take over the Powder Gangers and rule goodsprings like a king; Join him and burn these hillbillies out; Befriend him and hope to talk him out of this path; Kill him and then help goodsprings defend against his friends; Help goodsprings organize a defense; Ignore the whole thing, not my problem, my problems have moved on from goodsprings"

 

Then, quest lines could be set up according to those choices, with quest lines to follow, where if you choose the "bad" choice, it gets progressively worse, possibly where you end up facing a horde of powder gangers with nothing but a switchblade, and if you follow one of the 'good' routes things spawn in a way that it's reasonable to defeat them.

 

Just an example, of course. I'm no shrink, and I'm not sure what they would think would work well, either.

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This is an interesting article though it's a little short. Basically, the author makes the point that it should be possible to supplant whatever makes games appealing to most people into an environment where therapy is the goal rather than some gameplay goal. What's interesting is that the intended therapy needn't be overt, and in fact may actually need to be obscured (as the 'true' goal) in order for the game to be playable or seen as attractive. I feel like there's an unspoken assumption being made in the beginning of the article which is that there aren't any translatable, real-world or positive effects from playing games, which of course isn't true - this makes me question the rest of the article and whether it may actually be a good idea to make a stronger 'link' between reality and the virtual world as the author proposes.

 

To talk of someone as having a 'mental illness' without being specific is not without problems of its own, namely that it is stereotyping/stigmatizing (and may actually be harmful to understanding how to really help other people); but putting this aside, there are difficulties with how the experimenter interprets the results of an experiment where the moral outlook of the decisions available to the subject have already been made, and where they would be expected to be followed in such a way only to reinforce those preconceptions. This is a common trap that many people who haven't experienced playing games, notably lawmakers, have fallen into which is to think that the decisions one makes or the actions one takes in a videogame are a direct reflection of one's moral character or state of mind.

 

For instance, how many times have you heard that "playing violent videogames makes people violent?" So much research has been done to discredit this idea, yet it persists - in the same vein, what you just proposed for some kind of 'simulation' to help someone dealing with mental health issues (let's say being strongly antisocial) is something very similar: that if someone choices option A, which is the 'evil' option than they themselves must also be evil; and if they choose option B which is 'good' than the opposite must be true. You're right, you would have to roleplay as yourself if you wanted the results from such an experiment to be meaningful, but this would also demand that you break from reality.

 

I don't know how healthy it is to believe in an alternate reality to such a degree that you really think that the decisions you make and the things you do are in actuality, real - I don't know if such a thing is even possible without becoming schizophrenic! And this is precisely why that argument - that violence in games leads to violence in people's lives - doesn't hold any water. Because most healthy people don't really believe that they, themsleves are literally living in the game that they're playing. If they did, they might actually be really messed up in the head. At some point in childhood development, most everyone is able to distinguish between what is real and what they can imagine from reading a book.*

 

But back to the author's point, which is a good one - games are highly motivating and self-reinforcing , and as such offer the perfect learning environment. They can be very powerful tools to reinforce certain kinds of behavior. If a way of thinking about a problem, even if it's a moral one, is required with absolute rigidity in order to achieve some gameplay goal, then in theory the approach one learns to take in the virtual world may be generalized to this one to solve a similar problem. In practice, however, I don't think it's realistic to expect anybody of sound mind to believe in the authenticity of a virtual world to such a degree that would actually modify their behavior in this one to solve a moral problem. And if they did, we may have to call them insane.

 

So what the author proposes as first being 'necessary' in order to make games work in a therapy setting comes from a silly and wrong-headed (maybe just ignorant?) notion of how people play games and what they do for us - at the same time, overlooking the real utility of games to promote actual, transferable skills and problem solving techniques.

 

*Games are different from books and other media because they require active participation in order to be experienced - they provide immediate feedback and come with their own 'universe' of rules and regulations and things you absolutely can and cannot do; but at the same time, these rules cannot be changed at some level, or even known to the player. The feedback one receives may not be altered on a whim. So while it may be easy to generalize the morality tales of Aesop's Fables to our world - all we are equipped with is our imagination - a game inhabits its own virtual world which cannot be ignored and in most cases is very foreign to what we know about living in the real one. Much harder to generalize going from one to the other.

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