Ubisoft has announced plans to publish a DS game based on the "Easyway" smoking cessation program Allen Carr's Easyway to Stop Smoking, to be released in November will allow smokers to choose a coach (no doubt from a number of pleasant, athletic avatars) and create a program based on their own smoking habit. The Easyway method is based on educating smokers about the nature of addiction, convincing them that the positive feeling gained by smoking is caused by satisfying withdrawal from the previous cigarette. In this way, the emotional dependency is stripped away before the physical dependency is addressed.
We're quite torn about this announcement. Our first impulse is to point to this as emblematic of the troubling overabundance of training games. But on the other hand, if this helps someone stop smoking (which is totally hard!), it's completely validated.
More than anything, we'd like to congratulate Dan, who is already on a DS-based smoking cessation routine, for being such a pioneer.
[Via press release]
