Playing video games turns you into a homicidally violent, porn-obsessed maniac, or so certain newspapers seem to believe. But what if gaming were actually good for you? What if, whiling away the odd hour or two grasping a console, you could make yourself a healthier, emotionally fitter and more empathetic person?
In the past couple of years, there have been fascinating developments in the use of game-based scenarios to improve players’ mental and even physical health. Researchers such as Hunter Hoffman, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, found that hospital patients who immersed themselves in computer-generated worlds experienced lower levels of pain.
Hoffman concluded that the games’ key benefit was to offer a mental distraction that effectively served as a form of pain control. Virtual-reality programs, he found, could also help phobic patients overcome their fears of spiders. The treatments also worked for severe instances of post-traumatic stress disorder, for instance among New Yorkers traumatised by the September 11 attacks using a computer simulation of aircraft hitting the Twin Towers.
Now a group of games designers is bringing its own creativity to what some are calling “healing” games. Ari Hollander, a respected Seattle-based designer who has worked with Hoffman, readily admits that he is no clinician. But through his company, Imprint Interactive, Hollander has been working on similarly therapeutic games applications that appear to offer significant benefits to patients. One of them, developed for researchers at the University of Haifa in Israel, simulates a terrorist bus bombing as a means to help traumatised survivors overcome their shock. Other programs by Hollander he calls them “immersive virtual-reality simulations” are intended for treating American soldiers returning from the Middle East. In a “Virtual Iraq”, soldiers are confronted with simulated violence as a way to “help them face and ultimately overcome their fears through repetition”.
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This sector is still in its early days. With a limited consumer market, the graphics are nowhere near the level of, say, Grand Theft Auto. But in a maturing industry, more and more top-notch game designers are looking to use their skills to promote social good. At a recent Game Developers Conference in San Jose, Harvey Smith of Midway Games won a prize the “Virtual Nobel” for Peace Bomb, a community-building multiplayer online game intended to mobilise millions of players to stage instant protests and perform good deeds. Other gamers are looking to educate players and make them empathise with the victims of conflict. A Force More Powerful, “a game of non-violent strategy”, was developed by BreakAway Games for the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict to encourage oppressed groups to challenge dictators and corrupt regimes using “disruptive actions such as strikes, boycotts and mass protest” rather than AK-47s. Then there is Darfur Is Dying, an online game that lets players “experience” life as a Sudanese refugee.
Game designers, in other words, are more ethically plural than their tabloid critics credit. Maybe those critics should get with the program.
david.rowan@thetimes.co.uk