Games tackle psychology. How does that make you feel?

by Kyle Orland { Feb 9th 2007 at 6:00PM }

First it was fear of heights, then it was smoking addiction. Now Reuters has a short story on a couple of games that are taking on mental problems usually reserved for a trained therapist.

DS Therapy from Tokyo's Dimple Entertainment takes the Brain Training concept to its extremes by giving a daily "measurement on your mental and emotional health" based on a few light-hearted questions. We can only hope the result is more accurate than the psuedo-scientific "Brain Age" given by its inspiration.

Mindhabits Booster, meanwhile, seeks to "reduce stress levels and improve self-confidence" in players by asking them to pick out a smiling face among a sea of frowning ones. Personally, we think seeing a lone happy person outnumbered by a horde of depressed automatons might have the opposite effect, but none of us are psychology professors, so what do we know?

Tags: mental problems, MentalProblems, psychology, therapy

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Slaziman @ Feb 9th 2007 6:10PM

LOL?!

Intentless @ Feb 9th 2007 6:13PM

Its hard to feel happy when you are hunting through throngs of depressed people to find one happy person. Wouldn't it be better to find the one sad person and try to make them happy?

moosey @ Feb 9th 2007 6:58PM

its psychiatry not psychology

Grindstone @ Feb 9th 2007 6:59PM

Yes it has helped me. Before I was hesitant to actually hurt people, now I am rather unabashed with the idea. Oddly enough, my confidence is up too.

Video games are very therapeutic.

NeverSage @ Feb 9th 2007 7:43PM

I'll buy this game. But if it tells me I'm depressed, it will make me feel bad.

Deckart @ Feb 9th 2007 7:53PM

It is most certainly not psychiatry, moosey, and I wouldn't even consider it very good psychology.

I'm not a psychology professor, but I am a psychologist, and cash-ins like this are at best useless, and at worst could be quite dangerous. In most cases, they treat the symptoms and not the cause, leaving the subject no better off in the end. Useful if you are having a bad day, perhaps, but for someone suffering from depression looking for a quick solution (and they do), quite useless.

Video games can be very therapeutic and very beneficial, absolutely, but only when used in conjunction with professional help, not instead of.