Serious games in psychology: understanding through play

How do we, as fully fledged adult human beings, understand things? Through play. We build up our world view as we develop by playing games, socialising, interacting, learning about cause and effect and consequences in the low stakes setting of game play. So when things go wrong, and our understanding of something is flawed, why not return to the medium that served us, and everyone else, so well beforehand? By playing games.

Of course, we’re not talking about any old games, we’re talking about serious games. Psychology and mental health are serious topics, so when addressing related matters, we need to use games with serious purposes at the core of their design.

Defining psychology

Psychology as a subject is the study of the mind and its behaviour, and it can also refer to the mental characteristics of an individual or a group. Mental health is a broader concept, covering an individual’s psychological, emotional, and social wellbeing.

When we talk about serious games, we’re talking about games that aren’t designed purely for entertainment. They’re expressly designed to serve a serious purpose. They borrow popular game mechanics and tropes from video games, so provide an engaging and familiar format to most players. There are many types of serious games, but they are broadly used to facilitate learning and education, both in business contexts for training, and in classrooms.

Since the mid to late 2000s, serious games, and more broadly gamification – the application of game elements to typically less playful tasks – have been shown to be effective in promoting health. By appealing to a player’s desire for progress and improvement, serious games and gamification are effective methods to connect players’ motivations within a game (or a gamified context) to external actions. By showing players or users the effects positive actions can have within a game, and employing little hacks and psychological techniques to maintain streaks and healthy habits, this can deliver positive behavioural changes in real life.

Understanding through play

But how? How can a serious game encourage someone with a terrible diet to suddenly start eating healthier food? How can they get someone off the couch and have them shoot for 10,000 steps a day, to start the couch to 5K programme, to start training for an Ironman? Everyone knows that eating healthy is good for you. Everyone knows that exercise is good for you. What’s the serious game done? What’s made the serious game effective? The short answer is, it’s helped them to understand.

Especially in health related matters, where people generally know what they have to do, a serious game can illustrate the cause and effect of negative behaviours, and the cause and effect of positive behaviours. It connects the dots between knowing something and understanding why something is the way that it is. The same can be applied to matters of psychology and matters of mental health.

Obviously, in the case of customising a serious game for matters pertaining to helping someone with psychological or mental health issues, such as depression or extreme anxiety, the content will need to be written and approved by an expert in their field. However, whether it’s to help someone with serious mental health problems, or just as a way to help an employee improve their time management skills, or better deal with work stress by illustrating tried and tested approaches, the serious game format can be profoundly effective.

Creating serious games

Let’s take an example that doesn’t require the input of a clinical psychologist. Let’s assume you, as a business owner or HR professional, want to design a serious game to help employees be better prepared to handle unpredictable, potentially stressful work scenarios. Let’s pretend there’s some infrastructure changeover or a massive IT overhaul, and some disruptions will occur, and working patterns are going to change, but it’s scheduled, so you have time to prepare your teams. Well designed programmes of serious gaming can both help them develop professionally, and allow them to perform better for your company.

You could take the Dynamic Path™ model, which gives you access to all the game engines on the Drimify format to build a multi-level learning pathway for your employees. Nearly everyone knows what the ideal performer is in their roles and in their fields. There are soft skills and KPIs that everyone just recognises. Most people just lack the context of how to get there. If you’ve never been around a high performer, or a truly driven and purposeful individual, it can be easy to assume everyone is as developed as they can be and adopt a closed, stagnant mindset. But these keys to high performance, these “atomic habits,” aren’t the reserve of business coaches and self-help books. They’re out there, and easy enough for anyone to find. There are only 168 hours in a week, for the boss, for the foreman, for the new recruit. “Touch paper once.” Do, delay, delegate, drop. They’re obvious when you know them, and not that hard to employ once you see the results, and form the right habits.

Using Serious Games for psychological well-being

What the aim of your game is, its serious purpose, is to help players understand how to become that ideal performer. Utilising levels of pure content, both as text and video, to impart techniques, tips, and mindset approaches, and customised forms of the Quiz to run users through relevant scenarios, allows you to give them the tools to be that ideal performer, and afford them simulated practice in using them. They are learning new ideas and concepts that will allow them to get closer to what that ideal performer looks like. Through serious game play, you can give your teams the understanding they need to get to where they need to be. Well designed serious games are vehicles for potential.

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