My drama: Story-based game for understanding emotions in context

Abstract

This paper presents My Drama, a story-based game application that helps to understand emotions in context. The game was developed for young people with autism, who usually have trouble understanding the non-verbal expression of emotions. We combined elements of drama therapy and mobile game design to let players experience taking perspectives by assuming the role of the cartoon character and practice context-dependent recognition of expressed emotions in the story, and collecting of related to the story emotional expression photographs n in a known environment. The outcomes of a pilot test indicate that My Drama is a promising and engaging training tool for emotion understanding while collecting of emotional expression photographs increased the communication. Long-term research on its effectiveness is needed.