Creating Video Games to Treat Chronic Depression

Serious games is an emerging genre of video games where games are created in order to teach instead of strictly for entertainment and many involve health related issues. We are creating a video game to help treat patients with chronic depression. The game scenarios will simulate a situational analysis with the added benefit of the patients being able to replay the scenario and see how different choices affect the outcome. In order to be an effective treatment, psychologists will need to be able to create additional game scenarios to meet their patients’ needs. Since psychologists are unlikely to have any programming experience, a tool is needed to bridge this gap. ScriptEase allows non-programmers to create video game modules and will be used to solve this problem with the addition of patterns specific for these game scenarios.