Emily Gage

Children go through the usual gauntlet of challenges: moving, making new friends, encountering bullies at school. Extra stress is added to their lives when they have conditions such as obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety disorders or autism spectrum disorder. Going to therapy to learn how to handle stress can be boring or the concepts too complex for young children, so how do therapists help children adapt?

Enter Stephen Jacobs, associate professor of RIT’s School of Interactive Games and Media. He and a slew of students on co-op are creating a therapeutic video game called MindGamers in School (MG), the main project of the Games for Health Rochester chapter. The project started in the summer of 2011, with Kenneth Stewart II, Ivy Ngo and Jack McDonald coordinating with Dr. Robert Rice, assistant professor at St. John Fisher College, and Dr. Laurence Sugarman, director of the Center for Applied Psychophysiology and Self-regulation at RIT, to fully understand the medical and psychological scope of their game. Established in 2011, Games for Health Rochester strives to use video games and related technology to improve health and health care of people.

Fourth year Game Design and Development major Bryan Gawinski loves that he’s part of a project that helps so many. He had worked with children with autism before in soccer games, so he was aware of the challenges they face. “It’s nice to [create] a game that’s more than pure fun,” Gawinski said.

McDonald, a fifth year game design and development major who has since moved on from the project, shares the same sentiment. “You usually don’t get to work with the technology and games,” he said. “We’re trying to take a therapeutic practice and deliver it in a way that’s interesting for them.”

Students Mark Zimmerman, Megan Kushner and Steve Oyarijivbie have also worked on the project since 2011, along with Stewart, Ngo, McDonald and Gawinski. They worked on the project as full-time co-op students, while Jacobs took a more “hands-off” approach, to allow the cooperation between the student developers and Rice and Sugarman to form naturally.

Using games to heal is not a new concept. “People have been doing experiments with games and game-like environments for over 15 years,” Jacobs said in a phone interview. “It gained traction in the last five to six.” Virtual reality has been used to confront players with stressors such as spiders or heights, and pharmaceutical company Bayer released Didget, a blood glucose monitor that can be attached to a Nintendo DS and rewards the player for consistently testing and managing their diabetes.

In MG, the child plays with their therapist in the office. The child is hooked up to a NeXus-10 biofeedback sensor, using probes on the skin to measure breathing rate, skin temperature, skin conductance and heart rate; each value changes as the player becomes stressed. The player starts the game by creating three avatars. The first represents the player, while the second and third are paradigms. One is a goal-directed imp, or Inner Motivational Projection, decked out in armor and equipped with weapons on a utility belt, with names such as “Sword of Sharp Intellect” or “Pocket Watch of Slo Mo.” The other imp is problembased, causing the player to get in trouble.

Both imps fol low the player a round and come into play when they encounter something that causes stress in a school environment; the exact stressors are selected at character creation. The problem imp tries to get the player to perform the negative behavior, such as being late to class. The goal imp will distract the problem imp when the NeXus-10 reads that the player has a sufficiently low level on their Stressmeter, which is a single number representing the measured values of stress. The goal imp’s equipment represents tools the player can use to handle stress, such as stopping to count to five before acting. The therapist helps the player remember their tools to calm themselves, allowing the player to progress in the game.

Once MG is released, Jacobs hopes to continue working on the concept, creating other versions, such as MindGamers at Home, which would allow the player to practice the concepts learned in therapy . This would allow the therapist to get a better understanding of their progress over self-reported progress at their meetings. Currently, Jacobs is working on finding grants and donors to grow the project, including looking for full-time developers instead of relying on the more transient co-op students.