Blast from the Past: The Game Doesn’t Care: Why the Gamification of Mental Health Isn’t Working (Yet)

This post is from 5 years ago, July, 2013. I believe we’re all still thinking about and struggling with these same issues today! 

Games that are not games. There is a serious barrier to the effective gamification of mental health. This barrier is that the games we psychologists and health professionals are coming up with are not fun. In fact, they are totally uncool, border on the condescending, and wouldn’t motivate anyone to play for more than 30 seconds. This is the case even though the bar is set quite low because these “games” address things that people really want, like boosting our intelligence and memory, reducing depression and stress, quitting smoking, … fill in the blank. I’ve been fascinated with this disconnect between Psychology’s view and real-world acceptability. This disconnect is plaguing other fields as well, such as in the development of “serious games” for education. In this larger context, I’ve been working on the development of an app that takes a scientifically proven approach to reducing stress and anxiety, and embeds the “active ingredient” of this intervention into a game that is fun – fun enough, we hope, for someone to want to play for much more than 30 seconds.

Fun versus health goals. In the midst of  this ongoing development process, I had the pleasure of speaking with Nick Fortugno, co-founder of the game design company Playmatics. In addition to creating really fun games, like Diner Dash, he has created games to promote positive social change and is one of the visionary and forward-thinking advocates for the idea that serious games can and should be fun. So, he has a deep understanding of the barriers facing the gamification of mental health. As we were talking about these barriers, Nick said something that really got me thinking. He said, when we design games for education or health, we have to remember that “the game doesn’t care” about whether we’re making progress towards our goal. In other words, a game isn’t fun because it meets some criterion that we, the developers, have for success – like boosting our ability to remember, reducing symptoms of anxiety, or losing 5 pounds. A game is fun because it creates an aesthetic experience and facilitates game play that we want to come back to again and again. Therefore, I would argue that a “serious” goal embedded in a truly fun game is reached as a by-product of the fun.

The need for backward engineering. I think I am accurate in saying that very few people, myself included, who are trying to create serious games for wellness think like this – i.e., like a game designer – about the process of gamification. From what I can tell, game designers think very deeply about the experience they want the game to promote, and then they work through the pragmatics of the game play that will facilitate this experience. This backward engineering from the point of view of the aesthetic/experiential goal to the pragmatics of the game is the opposite of what psychologists do when they think about gamification. Instead, we have parallel streams of development in which (a) we know that our “game” (read scientific protocol) is truly boring, and (b) we have to somehow decrease the snore factor. We think: “Hm, here is my very rigid experimental protocol/computerized intervention. I must overlay this protocol with some cute little animated guys, perhaps with a fun back-story (wizards? aliens?) and then make sure users get points when they conform to the requirements of the protocol.” Sounds thrilling, huh? So fun? Exactly the recipe for the next Dots? Right…. So, we have a lot to learn from game designers, and I believe that crucial to the future of the endeavor of gamifying mental health is partnering with people who know how to create fun and understand the process of game design.

Pocket rituals. What would it be like if we created mental wellness tools, or even interventions for serious mental health problems, that were truly fun and that could become part of our array of habits and strategies for feeling better, reducing symptoms, performing more efficiently, or dealing with stress?  These games, if “snackable” would become our pocket rituals, our chill pills. We could take out our device for 5, 10, or 15 minutes and be empowered to bring about a targeted, appreciable positive impact. The barriers to use should be minimal, the experience intrinsically rewarding – that is, it feels good to play – as well as reinforcing because it helps us meet our health goals. I think many psychologists feel that this approach is not easily conducive to a rigorous scientific approach. But if we fail to find a way to do this – good science and giving people tools they want to use – then the whole endeavor is dead in the water.

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Why Digital Mental Health is Like the Wild West

Why Digital Mental Health is Like the Wild West

When I talk to people about the digital health space – specifically digital mental health – I often say, “It’s the Wild West!” and everyone nods. But then I stopped to think about what I really mean by the Wild West. I realize that the metaphor holds up very well.

There is a gold rush. The California Gold Rush began on January 24, 1848. News of the gold brought some 300,000 people to California from around the world. They were called forty-niners in reference to the year the fever really hit, 1949. Tens of billions of today’s dollars in gold was recovered. The gold rush transformed the economy of California and economies all over the world.

The financial opportunity – and temptation – represented by the digital mental health revolution is similarly profound. Americans alone spend over $148 billion annually on mental and emotional health. Moreover, more than half of people suffering from emotional and mental distress will never seek treatment – meaning there is a huge, unmet need. Of these who don’t seek treatment, over 45% cite price as a barrier, and over 40% cite stigma as a barrier. Digital health tools, like mental health apps, address these barriers by being highly accessible and highly affordable. They also have the potential to neutralize stigma because, as I’ve argued before, mobile devices are the hub of our lives and thus what we do on them automatically gains an aura of “good.”  Digital health therefore represents a perfect marriage between social good and economic potential, and there are plenty of forty-niners who see this opportunity and want to cash in.

There are snake oil salesmen. Indeed, many companies are jumping on the wagon and digging for digital health gold (to keep the Wild West metaphor going). Some of these companies offer great, beneficial products, but others are “snake oil salesman.” Snake oil is an old-fashioned term that tends to refer to fraudulent health products or unproven medicine, but in general refers to any product of questionable quality. A snake oil salesman is someone who knowingly sells these fraudulent products. You see these guys as comic relief in Western movies all the time, usually a traveling “doctor” selling fake medicines, who leaves town before customers realize they have been cheated.

One way for us to get around the risk of snake oil is to elevate the dialog around digital health and develop ways of evaluating the scientific quality of what’s out there, since none of this is regulated (yet). This will help us look past the shiny bottles of alluring medicines that are actually snake oil, and find the real healing agents. Psyberguide is one organization I came across that appears to be trying to do just that.  If we don’t push ourselves as an industry to meet standards, we risk becoming comic relief rather than a true paradigm shift. We also risk repeating the failures of the analog healthcare system, just making them digital.

There are pioneers.  I believe that a science-backed digital health revolution will be the single most important paradigm shift in the failing mental health industry. This revolution will allow people to promote their personal wellness like they do their physical wellness and fitness. It will allow people to access treatments that are effective without being too expensive, burdensome, or stigmatizing. We need to think outside of the box for a true paradigm shift to occur in how people access support for their emotional and mental health – whether that’s the transformation of how patients access their health information through electronic medical records, how health information is collated to lead to better diagnosis and treatment, how health information is gathered through tests done on mobile devices, or how interventions are accessed, through mobile health apps and digital brain training. Pioneers in digital health are rethinking how to empower the individual to promote their own mental and emotional wellness, to use personal health information to actually improve our lives, not just be monetized by big companies mining our big data.

I firmly believe that destigmatizing mental illness and emotional distress will be the linchpin in this paradigm shift. Mental health – when we say those words, we think illness, not health. We think of people being crazy, despondent.  Why is that? It is because Psychology and Psychiatry have failed to make mental health a positive goal like physical health and fitness. When we struggle emotionally, we feel broken. Treatments are burdensome, hard to access, and stigmatizing. We need to be on the vanguard of a paradigm shift away from stigmatizing, expensive treatments emerging from the “if we build it they will come” mentality, and towards a new vision in which people are empowered to personalize their mental wellness through tools that work for them, when and where they want them.

If pioneers brave the Wild West that is the digital health field of 2015, we have a chance of creating something that transcends our humble beginnings to actually make a difference.

The Game Doesn’t Care: Why the Gamification of Mental Health Isn’t Working (Yet)

Games that are not games. There is a serious barrier to the effective gamification of mental health. This barrier is that the games we psychologists and health professionals are coming up with are not fun. In fact, they are totally uncool, border on the condescending, and wouldn’t motivate anyone to play for more than 30 seconds. This is the case even though the bar is set quite low because these “games” address things that people really want, like boosting our intelligence and memory, reducing depression and stress, quitting smoking, … fill in the blank. I’ve been fascinated with this disconnect between Psychology’s view and real-world acceptability. This disconnect is plaguing other fields as well, such as in the development of “serious games” for education. In this larger context, I’ve been working on the development of an app that takes a scientifically proven approach to reducing stress and anxiety, and embeds the “active ingredient” of this intervention into a game that is fun – fun enough, we hope, for someone to want to play for much more than 30 seconds.

Fun versus health goals. In the midst of  this ongoing development process, I had the pleasure of speaking with Nick Fortugno, co-founder of the game design company Playmatics. In addition to creating really fun games, like Diner Dash, he has created games to promote positive social change and is one of the visionary and forward-thinking advocates for the idea that serious games can and should be fun. So, he has a deep understanding of the barriers facing the gamification of mental health. As we were talking about these barriers, Nick said something that really got me thinking. He said, when we design games for education or health, we have to remember that “the game doesn’t care” about whether we’re making progress towards our goal. This elegant idea highlights the fact that a game isn’t fun because it meets some criterion we have for success – like boosting our ability to remember, reducing symptoms of anxiety, or losing 5 pounds. A game is fun because it creates an aesthetic experience and facilitates game play that we want to come back to again and again. Therefore, I would argue that a “serious” goal embedded in a truly fun game is reached almost as a by-product of the fun.

The need for backward engineering. I think I am accurate in saying that very few people, myself included, who are trying to create serious games for wellness think like this – i.e., like a game designer – about the process of gamification. From what I can tell, game designers think very deeply about the experience they want the game to promote, and then they work through the pragmatics of the game play that will facilitate this experience. This backward engineering from the point of view of the aesthetic/experiential goal to the pragmatics of the game is the opposite of what psychologists do when they think about gamification. Instead, we have parallel streams of development in which (a) we know that our “game” (read scientific protocol) is truly boring, and (b) we have to somehow decrease the snore factor. We think: “Hm, here is my very rigid experimental protocol/computerized intervention. I must overlay this protocol with some cute little animated guys, perhaps with a fun back-story (wizards? aliens?) and then make sure users get points when they conform to the requirements of the protocol.” Sounds thrilling, huh? So fun? Exactly the recipe for the next Dots? Right…. So, we have a lot to learn from game designers, and I believe that crucial to the future of the endeavor of gamifying mental health is partnering with people who know how to create fun and understand the process of game design.

Pocket rituals. What would it be like if we created mental wellness tools, or even interventions for serious mental health problems, that were truly fun and that could become part of our array of habits and strategies for feeling better, reducing symptoms, performing more efficiently, or dealing with stress?  These games, if “snackable” would become our pocket rituals, our chill pills. We could take out our device for 5, 10, or 15 minutes and be empowered to bring about a targeted, appreciable positive impact. The barriers to use should be minimal, the experience intrinsically rewarding – that is, it feels good to play – as well as reinforcing because it helps us meet our health goals. I think many psychologists feel that this approach is not easily conducive to a rigorous scientific approach. But if we fail to find a way to do this – good science and giving people tools they want to use – then the whole endeavor is dead in the water.