Video Games as a Psychoeducational Tool

This project is working under the thesis that video games are an effective tool for psychoeducation. We are building a dating sim game (a narrative-driven game in which players interact with characters toward building relationships) with the goal of teaching healthy relationship behaviors. We want to help people with trauma learn how to trust again and we are doing so using a genre lens of horror, specifically slasher movies. By exploring parallels of not knowing who to trust and actively overcoming fear, the player will be able to explore parallels of the fear that comes with new relationships as well as the fear that can be initiated by embarking on a new relationship. Our exhibit will feature laptops with demos of the game itself that we are currently conducting research on, as well as a poster showing the results and analysis of the research that is being conducted presently. We want to show how this game condition (hopefully) correlates with our previous research showing that gamified conditions have a significant effect on psychoeduation connection with participants. Our current hypothesis is that, by including an arcade style minigame in the presentation, participants will show an even higher significance of connection with the material over the previous studies. The core members of our Magic team will present at our exhibit and hopefully Dr. Sangiorgio will be in attendance as well (she is based out of NYC, so this attendance is not confirmed at this time).