Psychotherapy based game design for healing brain tumor in children

Abstract

Brain tumor is the second largest deadly disease in children. Diagnosis of brain tumor in children may lead to other problems including psychological distress. Recent research has proven that health games have been effective for the management of psychological problems. There is still lack of psychotherapeutic game design that would help patients to alleviate psychological distress. Therefore this research proposes automation of psychotherapy using game design. The proposed game design integrates psychotherapy into it. The psychotherapy design consists of play therapy and guided imagery therapy to make a play guided imagery therapy (PGIT). The existing Mechanics, Dynamics and Aesthetics (MDA) game design framework has been enhanced into Mechanics, Dynamics, Aesthetics and Therapy (MDA-T) framework to facilitates the development of game that includes psychotherapy aspect in the design. The therapeutic game is developed and experimented on children with brain tumor. Two groups were formed with one group played the game and other group acts as a control group. Both the groups have undergone established psychological testing before and after playing the game. The results prove that the group that played the game had shown remarkable improvement as compared to their results before game playing. On the other hand, the control group has shown no significant improvement. The four psychological symptoms that represent the main indicators of brain tumor patients are measured. They are anxiety, depression, aggression and disruptive behavior. The results of the experiment shows that, anxiety and depression of the children have been reduced by more than 30%, and, anger and disruptive behavior are reduced by 20% and 5% respectively. In conclusion, the proposed therapeutic game has contributed toward producing positive behavioral changes in children with brain tumor.