Designing More Engaging Serious Games to Support Students' Mental Health: A Pilot Study Based on A CBT-Informed Design Framework
Ting-Chen Hsu, Zheyuan Zhang, Ziyi Chen, Yuwen Liu, Yanjia Liu
TLDR
A new framework (TPR-MMF) and game prototype significantly boost engagement in mental health serious games for students.
Key contributions
- Proposed the Therapeutic Procedural Rhetoric and Mechanism Mapping Framework (TPR-MMF) for serious game design.
- Developed "World + You - World," a CBT-informed serious game prototype using the TPR-MMF framework.
- Demonstrated TPR-MMF games significantly increase intrinsic motivation compared to traditional educational games.
- Qualitative data showed players perceived psychological metaphors and connected game mechanics to real life.
Why it matters
This paper offers a fresh, engaging approach to mental health serious game design, tackling issues of dullness and low compliance. Its framework and prototype significantly boost student motivation, paving the way for more effective and widely adopted digital mental health support tools.
Original Abstract
Addressing the issues of dullness, low compliance, and lack of appeal in current digital mental health education and serious games for students and adolescents, this study proposes a novel, experience-centered framework for serious game design: the Therapeutic Procedural Rhetoric and Mechanism Mapping Framework (TPR-MMF). Based on this framework, a side-scrolling serious game prototype, "World + You - World," was developed. This study compared the effectiveness of TPR-MMF-based games with traditional explicit educational serious games through a small-sample randomized controlled trial (N=28). The results of the Intrinsic Motivation Inventory (IMI) showed that the experimental group (playing "World + You - World") significantly outperformed the control group in four aspects. Furthermore, qualitative survey results indicated that players could perceive the psychological metaphors within the game mechanics and spontaneously resonated with real-life experiences. This study provides a highly engaging new development paradigm for gamified mental health education for students and adolescents.
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