MindTerior: A Mental Healthcare Game with Metaphoric Gamespace and Effective Activities for Mitigating Mild Emotional Difficulties

Abstract

Contemporaries suffer from more stress and emotional difficulties, but developing practices that allow them to manage and become aware of emotional states has been a challenge. MindTerior is a mental health care game developed for people who occasionally experience mild emotional difficulties. The game contains four mechanisms: measuring players' emotional state, providing game activities that help mitigate certain negative emotions, visualizing players' emotional state and letting players cultivate the game space with customizable items, and completing game events that educate players on how to cope with certain negative emotions. This set of gameplays can allow players to experience effective positive emotional relaxation and to perform gamified mental health care activities. Playtest showed that projecting players' emotional state to a virtual game space is helpful for players to be conscious of their emotional state, and playing gamified activities is helpful for mental health care. Additionally, the game motivated players to practice the equivalent activities in real life.