scholarly journals Mental Health in 3D

Loading ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 14 (24) ◽  
pp. 122-133
Author(s):  
Kelli Dunlap ◽  
Rachel Kowert
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Mental Illness ◽  
Video Games ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Digital Games ◽  
Traditional Media ◽  
Dominant Form ◽  
Video Game Content ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
New Framework

There is a wealth of research on the depiction and impact of mental health representations in traditional media; however, less is known about video games. As the dominant form of media in the 21st century, video games uniquely portray mental illness in traditional ways as well as in ways unique to video games, such as in-game mechanics (e.g., sanity meters) and player-driven decision making. This paper outlines the importance of cultural messages relating to mental illness as conveyed through video games in terms of content and influence and presents a multi-dimensional model of analysis for the representation of mental illness in digital games. The aim of this paper is to provide a foundation for understanding how mental illness is represented in digital games, provide a new perspective for thinking critically about representation of mental illness in games, and overview a new framework for assessing video game content in this area.

scholarly journals Digital Game Interventions for Youth Mental Health Services (Gaming My Way to Recovery): Protocol for a Scoping Review

10.2196/13834 ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (6) ◽  
pp. e13834
Author(s):  
Manuela Ferrari ◽  
Sarah V McIlwaine ◽  
Jennifer Ann Reynolds ◽  
Suzanne Archie ◽  
Katherine Boydell ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Video Games ◽  
Mental Health Services ◽  
Health Services ◽  
Scoping Review ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Digital Games ◽  
Youth Mental Health ◽  
Health Conditions ◽  
Digital Game

Background Digital or video games are played by millions of adolescents and young adults around the world and are one of the technologies used by youths to access mental health services. Youths with mental health problems strongly endorse the use of technologies, including mobile and online platforms, to receive information, support their treatment journeys (eg, decision-making tools), and facilitate recovery. A growing body of literature explores the advantages of playing digital games for improving attention span and memory, managing emotions, promoting behavior change, and supporting treatment for mental illness (eg, anxiety, depression, or posttraumatic stress disorder). The research field has also focused on the negative impact of video games, describing potential harms related to aggression, addiction, and depression. To promote clarity on this matter, there is a great need for knowledge synthesis offering recommendations on how video games can be safely and effectively adopted and integrated into youth mental health services. Objective The Gaming My Way to Recovery scoping review project assesses existing evidence on the use of digital game interventions within the context of mental health services for youths (aged 11-29 years) using the stepped care model as the conceptual framework. The research question is as follows: For which youth mental health conditions have digital games been used and what broad objectives (eg, prevention, treatment) have they addressed? Methods Using the methodology proposed by Arksey and O’Malley, this scoping review will map the available evidence on the use of digital games for youths between 11 and 29 years old with mental health or substance use problems, or both. Results The review will bring together evidence-based knowledge to assist mental health providers and policymakers in evaluating the potential benefits and risks of these interventions. Following funding of the project in September 2018, we completed the search in November 2018, and carried out data screening and stakeholder engagement activities during preparation of the protocol. We will conduct a knowledge synthesis based on specific disorders, treatment level and modality, type of service, population, settings, ethical practices, and user engagement and offer recommendations concerning the integration of video game technologies and programs, future research and practice, and knowledge dissemination. Conclusions Digital game interventions employ unique, experiential, and interactive features that potentially improve skills and facilitate learning among players. Digital games may also provide a new treatment platform for youths with mental health conditions. Assessing current knowledge on video game technology and interventions may potentially improve the range of interventions offered by youth mental health services while supporting prevention, intervention, and treatment. International Registered Report Identifier (IRRID) PRR1-10.2196/13834

scholarly journals Digital Game Interventions for Youth Mental Health Services (Gaming My Way to Recovery): Protocol for a Scoping Review (Preprint)

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manuela Ferrari ◽  
Sarah V McIlwaine ◽  
Jennifer Ann Reynolds ◽  
Suzanne Archie ◽  
Katherine Boydell ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Video Games ◽  
Mental Health Services ◽  
Health Services ◽  
Scoping Review ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Digital Games ◽  
Youth Mental Health ◽  
Health Conditions ◽  
Digital Game

BACKGROUND Digital or video games are played by millions of adolescents and young adults around the world and are one of the technologies used by youths to access mental health services. Youths with mental health problems strongly endorse the use of technologies, including mobile and online platforms, to receive information, support their treatment journeys (eg, decision-making tools), and facilitate recovery. A growing body of literature explores the advantages of playing digital games for improving attention span and memory, managing emotions, promoting behavior change, and supporting treatment for mental illness (eg, anxiety, depression, or posttraumatic stress disorder). The research field has also focused on the negative impact of video games, describing potential harms related to aggression, addiction, and depression. To promote clarity on this matter, there is a great need for knowledge synthesis offering recommendations on how video games can be safely and effectively adopted and integrated into youth mental health services. OBJECTIVE The Gaming My Way to Recovery scoping review project assesses existing evidence on the use of digital game interventions within the context of mental health services for youths (aged 11-29 years) using the stepped care model as the conceptual framework. The research question is as follows: For which youth mental health conditions have digital games been used and what broad objectives (eg, prevention, treatment) have they addressed? METHODS Using the methodology proposed by Arksey and O’Malley, this scoping review will map the available evidence on the use of digital games for youths between 11 and 29 years old with mental health or substance use problems, or both. RESULTS The review will bring together evidence-based knowledge to assist mental health providers and policymakers in evaluating the potential benefits and risks of these interventions. Following funding of the project in September 2018, we completed the search in November 2018, and carried out data screening and stakeholder engagement activities during preparation of the protocol. We will conduct a knowledge synthesis based on specific disorders, treatment level and modality, type of service, population, settings, ethical practices, and user engagement and offer recommendations concerning the integration of video game technologies and programs, future research and practice, and knowledge dissemination. CONCLUSIONS Digital game interventions employ unique, experiential, and interactive features that potentially improve skills and facilitate learning among players. Digital games may also provide a new treatment platform for youths with mental health conditions. Assessing current knowledge on video game technology and interventions may potentially improve the range of interventions offered by youth mental health services while supporting prevention, intervention, and treatment. INTERNATIONAL REGISTERED REPORT PRR1-10.2196/13834

The Effect of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Video Game Consumption in Turkey

2022 ◽  
pp. 151-167
Author(s):  
Yasemin Özkent
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Social Distance ◽  
Digital Games ◽  
Online Video ◽  
Digital Game ◽  
Leisure Education ◽  
Daily Work ◽  
The World ◽  
Online Video Games

Different precautions such as quarantine, social distance, and hygiene applications have been taken around the world to prevent the spreading of the virus during the COVID-19 pandemic. While these precautions brought many sectors to a halt, digital-based platforms have been used more actively. The pandemic changed daily work, leisure, education, and the time spent with families and how people distribute their time on these items. The interest toward digital games increased as the result of COVID-19 quarantine. As people spent more time at home, they tended to play games to socialize. This study aims to evaluate the changes and tendencies in the consumption of video games during the pandemic period in Turkey. Accordingly, the consumption of online video games in 2020 was analyzed through comparing with 2019. As a result, it was detected that more time and money was spent during the pandemic period on the digital game sector which was also important before.

The Inescapable Intertextuality of Blade Runner: The Video Game

2016 ◽  
pp. 22-38
Author(s):  
Clara Fernandez-Vara
Keyword(s):  
Video Game ◽  
Digital Games ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Fictional World ◽  
Traditional Media ◽  
Transmedia Storytelling ◽  
Blade Runner ◽  
The World ◽  
Digital Environments ◽  
Source Materials

The video game adaptation of Blade Runner (1997) exemplifies the challenges of adapting narrative from traditional media into digital games. The key to the process of adaptation is the fictional world, which it borrows both from Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) and Ridley Scott's film Blade Runner (1982). Each of these works provides different access points to the world, creating an intertextual relationship that can be qualified as transmedia storytelling, as defined by Jenkins (2006). The game utilizes the properties of digital environments (Murray, 2001) in order to create a world that the player can explore and participate in; for this world to have the sort of complexity and richness that gives way to engaging interactions, the game resorts to the film to create a visual representation, and to the themes of the novel. Thus the game is inescapably intertextual, since it needs of both source materials in order to make the best of the medium of the video game.

scholarly journals Reducing Mental Health Stigma Through Identification With Video Game Avatars With Mental Illness

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arienne Ferchaud ◽  
Jonmichael Seibert ◽  
Nicholas Sellers ◽  
Nivia Escobar Salazar
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Mental Illness ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Mental Health Stigma

scholarly journals New Social Horizons: Anxiety, Isolation, and Animal Crossing During the COVID-19 Pandemic

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanna E. Lewis ◽  
Mia Trojovsky ◽  
Molly M. Jameson
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Video Games ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Online Survey ◽  
Simulation Game ◽  
New Horizons ◽  
Emotional Outcomes ◽  
Social Gaming ◽  
The Impact

Increased participation in activities has been associated with improved positive mental health outcomes. However, there is much debate regarding the net effects of video games on individuals. Typified as a socially isolating activity, many games inherently contain socialization within the environment with game-generated characters or other players. Coinciding with the time of the initial pandemic/quarantine period was the release of a popular socializing and life simulation game, Animal Crossing: New Horizons. We investigated whether participation in this game was related to emotional outcomes associated with pandemics (e.g., loneliness and anxiety). The relationship between deleterious mental health and social gaming, amid a time of enforced reduction in socializing, would allow us to isolate the impact of the introduction of a social video game on improving the quality of life for players of this game. Participants (n = 1053) were asked about their time spent playing video games via an online survey, their socialization in game play, loneliness, and anxiety. We predicted that participants with higher levels of social interaction within the game would report less loneliness and anxiety. Utilizing multiple linear regression analyses, the research found that increased gaming and related activities were predictive of higher anxiety and somewhat related to increased loneliness. However, increased visits to another island were associated with lower levels of loneliness. As such, players may be utilizing gaming as a coping mechanism for anxiety. This research may inform generalized research regarding the influence that social games may have on feelings of loneliness and anxiety.

scholarly journals Framing Mental Health Within Digital Games: An Exploratory Case Study of Hellblade

10.2196/12432 ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. e12432 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Fordham ◽  
Christopher Ball
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Mental Illness ◽  
Collaborative Design ◽  
Game Design ◽  
Mental Health Problems ◽  
Frame Analysis ◽  
Digital Games ◽  
Health Issues ◽  
Embodied Experiences

Background Researchers and therapists have increasingly turned to digital games for new forms of treatments and interventions for people suffering from a variety of mental health issues. Yet, the depiction of mental illness within digital games typically promotes stigmatized versions of those with mental health concerns. Recently, more games have attempted to implement more realistic and respectful depictions of mental health conditions. Objective This paper presents an exploratory analysis of a contemporary game that has the potential to change the way researchers, practitioners, and game designers approach topics of mental health within the context of gaming. Methods A case study of Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice was conducted using frame analysis to show how key design choices for this game present the potential for new ways of approaching games and mental health. Results A case study of Hellblade’s development shows how research-informed collaborative design with mental health practitioners, scientists, and individuals with mental health problems can lead to a realistic depiction of mental illness in games. Furthermore, the use of frame analysis demonstrates how to harness narrative, mechanics, and technology to create embodied experiences of mental health, which has the potential to promote empathetic understanding. Conclusions This paper highlights an exemplary case of collaborative commercial game design for entertainment purposes in relation to mental health. Understanding the success of Hellblade's depiction of psychosis can improve serious games research and design. Further research must continue to provide deeper analysis of not only games that depict mental illness, but also the design process behind them.

Asian Americans and Digital Games

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher B. Patterson
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Video Game ◽  
American Studies ◽  
Digital Games ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Online Forums ◽  
Asian American Studies ◽  
Open World

Asian Americans have frequently been associated with video games. As designers they are considered overrepresented, and specific groups appear to dominate depictions of the game designer, from South Asian and Chinese immigrants working for Microsoft and Silicon Valley to auteur designers from Japan, Taiwan, and Iran, who often find themselves with celebrity status in both America and Asia. As players, Asian Americans have been depicted as e-sports fanatics whose association with video game expertise—particularly in games like Starcraft, League of Legends, and Counter-Strike—is similar to sport-driven associations of racial minorities: African Americans and basketball or Latin Americans and soccer. This immediate association of Asian Americans with gaming cultures breeds a particular form of techno-orientalism, defined by Greta A. Niu, David S. Roh, and Betsy Huang as “the phenomenon of imagining Asia and Asians in hypo- or hypertechnological terms in cultural productions and political discourse.” In sociology, Asian American Studies scholars have considered how these gaming cultures respond to a lack of acceptance in “real sports” and how Asian American youth have fostered alternative communities in PC rooms, arcades, and online forums. For still others, this association also acts as a gateway for non-Asians to enter a “digital Asia,” a space whose aesthetics and forms are firmly intertwined with Japanese gaming industries, thus allowing non-Asian subjects to inhabit “Asianness” as a form of virtual identity tourism. From a game studies point of view, video games as transnational products using game-centered (ludic) forms of expression push scholars to think beyond the limits of Asian American Studies and subjectivity. Unlike films and novels, games do not rely upon representations of minority figures for players to identify with, but instead offer avatars to play with through styles of parody, burlesque, and drag. Games do not communicate through plot and narrative so much as through procedures, rules, and boundaries so that the “open world” of the game expresses political and social attitudes. Games are also not nationalized in the same way as films and literature, making “Asian American” themes nearly indecipherable. Games like Tetris carry no obvious national origins (Russian), while games like Call of Duty and Counter-Strike do not explicitly reveal or rely upon the ethnic identities of their Asian North American designers. Games challenge Asian American Studies as transnational products whose authors do not identify explicitly as Asian American, and as a form of artistic expression that cannot be analyzed with the same reliance on stereotypes, tropes, and narrative. It is difficult to think of “Asian American” in the traditional sense with digital games. Games provide ways of understanding the Asian American experience that challenge traditional meanings of being Asian American, while also offering alternative forms of community through transethnic (not simply Asian) and transnational (not simply American) modes of belonging.

scholarly journals Thinking and Doing: Challenge, Agency, and the Eudaimonic Experience in Video Games

2019 ◽  
pp. 155541201988153 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Cole ◽  
Marco Gillies
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Emotional Experiences ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Play Experience ◽  
New Framework

The nascent growth of video games has led to great leaps in technical understanding in how to create a functional and entertaining play experience. However, the complex, mixed-affect, eudaimonic entertainment experience that is possible when playing a video game—how it is formed, how it is experienced, and how to design for it—has been investigated far less than hedonistic emotional experiences focusing on fun, challenge, and “enjoyment.” Participants volunteered to be interviewed about their mixed-affect emotional experiences of playing avant-garde video games. New conceptions of agency emerged (actual, interpretive, fictional, mechanical) from the analysis of transcripts and were used to produce a framework of four categories of agency. This new framework offers designers and researchers the extra nuance in conversations around agency and contributes to the discussion of how we can design video games that allow for complex, reflective, eudaimonic emotional experiences.

Product Placement in Video Games

2016 ◽  
pp. 1690-1711
Author(s):  
Inés Küster ◽  
Natalia Vila ◽  
Asunción Hernández ◽  
Pedro Canales ◽  
Vicente Castillo
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Concept Map ◽  
Product Placement ◽  
Image Transfer ◽  
Traditional Media

Organizations look for new ways of communication as traditional media is being saturated with advertising messages. One of the alternatives is product placement in video games. This chapter analyses this new communication alternative. Moreover, through an investigation the chapter shows the consequences of placing a brand in this form of electronic entertainment – in the sense of image transfer from the video game to the brand. Specifically, this chapter focuses on the emotions evoked by the video game. Therefore, the present study develops a scale of emotions adapted to the theme of this research. Additionally, this study analyses the differences between types of product placement and their effects in the image transfer. All conclusions are extracted from the concept map technique.

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