Designing of therapeutic Games
The challenge
In this project, I had the opportunity to participate in the process of participatory design of therapeutic games for young people in the process of rehabilitation of drug use and for patients hospitalized with depression. In addition, I also helped develop a therapeutic game modeling artifact from the insights gained during the game design and development process.
Works
Prototype of the game to help treat depression
I participated in the process of creation and evaluation of the prototype of an aid game for treating depression developed by the LIFeS research group, which I was a member during my Master's degree in Computer Science.
In the first interaction, patients with depressive symptoms interacted with the prototype of the game called "Caring for Good", where the scenario was a beauty salon, in which the character goes to a party and has to choose clothes and shoes that will use and also combing. The idea was to encourage patients to take care of themselves and improve self-esteem.
We did the evaluation through the Thinking Aloud, observing the reactions of patients and the SAM questionnaire that is a non-verbal pictorial assessment technique that directly measures the pleasure, arousal, and dominance associated with a person’s affective reaction to a wide variety of stimuli.
design of the game focused on drug rehab
The therapeutic game for addicts aimed to convey values and show the consequence of choices in life.
To create the game against drug addiction, we use participatory design techniques. To start the design phase, we prepared some scenarios places that can influence dependent chemical back to using drugs (bars and drug sales points) and places that can help them to recover from addiction (hospital and home environment).
After defining scenarios, we did an event called "Plot Fest" for IHC lab researchers - LIFeS, health professionals and college students volunteer to help us to draw up possible dialogues through the participatory design process. The first step was to ask the participants to list possible situations that may occur in certain scenarios, and to define actions and consequences. The second step was to define the plot by inserting actions, consequences, and dialogues.
In the first interaction with the game prototype, we looked at the users and annotated their reactions to future refinements.
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The first scenario of the prototype was a bar, where the main character receives the proposal of a drug dealer, he has few minutes to say yes or no. Every decision made in the game phases will directly reflect the emotional state and health of the character. The player who decides the future of this character.
These evaluations of the prototypes turned in the paper and regional site:
Presentations of the Works
Feel free to watch the story.
I had the pleasure of presenting a poster and demonstrating the work (written by other members of the laboratory) related to the therapeutic game of depression in the XIV Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computational Systems (IHC 2015): "A study on aspects of flexibility in digital therapeutic games aimed at the treatment of people with depression "(BOCANEGRA; AZEVEDO; GARCIA; NERIS, 2015). The poster featured part of the dressing room scene.
To facilitate the design of therapeutic games, we started the development of a model to specify the context of therapeutic play for treating people with depression flexibility aspects, recording and therapeutic objective (including cognitive stimulation).
Modeling of therapeutic games
Modeling of games to assist the teaching of children with disabilities
Our first use case was to model therapeutic games for children with disabilities. Unlike the other games presented previously, this game has as main objective to allow the teacher to edit the games according to the needs of the exceptional children.