Bonny Hazelwood on how videogames can help your mental and physical health by transporting you to a different place, mood and moment.

 

“If asked to forecast what they believed 2020 had in store for them, it’s a safe bet that not many people reckoned they’d be grounded in their local area, rebuilding their lives and forever in debt to a talking raccoon.”

 

If asked to forecast what they believed 2020 had in store for them, it’s a safe bet that not many people reckoned they’d be grounded in their local area, rebuilding their lives and forever in debt to a talking raccoon. Such was the fortunate timing of the release of Animal Crossing: New Horizons for the Nintendo Switch, which at time of writing has sold over 22 million copies. For any non-villagers reading, it’s a colourful simulator where you move to a deserted island and roam around the great outdoors, catching fish and growing crops with only (anthropomorphic) animals for company. Because of this it’s been widely hailed as a tonic to the isolation felt around the world due to the COVID-19 pandemic. But the use of gaming and virtual experiences to help in times of uncertainty is far from new.

 

“Virtual reality provides a solution: the patient can still be placed in a highly-realistic scenario, but the therapist can precisely manipulate the patient’s environment, so they only confront more intense stages of their phobia when they are completely comfortable with the lower stages.”

 

Anxiety disorders, including phobias, are commonly treated with exposure therapy. This means the patient will gradually confront their fear in a controlled environment – for example, someone with arachnophobia would progress from looking at a picture of a spider to holding a live spider. The problem is that other fearful scenarios, such as taking off in a plane, can be inconvenient and expensive to put a patient through several times in a row. There’s also the risk of the real-life (or in-vivo) experience being too intense for the patient to handle with the therapist unable to fully control it. Virtual reality provides a solution: the patient can still be placed in a highly-realistic scenario, but the therapist can precisely manipulate the patient’s environment, so they only confront more intense stages of their phobia when they are completely comfortable with the lower stages. Seeing the virtual environment from the same point of view as the patient could also allow a therapist to pinpoint precisely what is causing the anxiety, solving the underlying problem more quickly (Gorini & Riva, 2008).

 

“Researchers in the USA and Hong Kong have found that ‘empowerment interventions’ – playing video games during treatment periods – preserve the mental health of young cancer patients and help maintain their ‘fighting spirit’”

Equally or more distressing can be physical illness, and the gruelling treatments involved for diseases like cancer. Researchers in the USA and Hong Kong have found that ‘empowerment interventions’ – playing video games during treatment periods – preserve the mental health of young cancer patients and help maintain their ‘fighting spirit’ (Govender et al., 2015). This works by increasing activation of the brain’s reward system, powered by the neurotransmitter dopamine. Lower transmission of dopamine has been linked to symptoms of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, so intervening to ensure the reward system is kept well during a time of major stress not only preserves optimism in the present, but could have long-term benefits for patients in their future.

Ultimately, what all these examples tell us is that using technology to transport someone to a different place, moment and mood can be amazingly helpful in their darkest hours.

Now, if there aren’t any questions, I need to harvest my orange trees.