206 Chapter 4 bedroom, he finds Teru, a magical glowing hat that faces him with the task of saving grandmother from the evil forces that have possessed her and the house. Teru teaches Arty (and the player) to change his state of mind and thereby overcome his fears. The player controls the movement of Arty using a Microsoft Xbox 360 controller and (s)he controls Teru’s light via the Neurosky one-channel dry-sensor EEG headset (i.e., MindWave). Several evidence-based, theoretically grounded strategies for decreasing anxiety were translated into game mechanics: neurofeedback, exposure, and attention bias modification. The game mechanic associated with neurofeedback involves the amount of light that shines from the player character’s (Teru’s) magical hat. The EEG headset that the player wears measures the real-time relaxation of the player, which in turn controls the amount of light in the game environment. When the player becomes more relaxed, the light becomes brighter. The exposure game mechanic involves fear events (i.e., fearful obstacles) that need to be approached in order to play through the game. By shining one’s light on the fear events they can be chased away or uncovered. Uncovered fear events will either turn into a friendly kitten or an animal/benign object which rewards the player with a coin that is needed to unlock the (attention bias modification) puzzles. In these puzzles, the player learns to focus on and attend to portraits of happy faces rather than threatening faces. To complete the puzzle, the player needs to shine one’s light on the happy faces, which eventually will turn the light back on in that particular room. For a more elaborate description of MindLight, see previous papers on the applied game (Schoneveld et al., 2016, 2018; Wijnhoven et al., 2015; Wols et al., 2018). Children played MindLight in 1-h sessions at school, after regular school hours, once a week, for 6 weeks. Children played the game individually but they were seated in a room with about five to ten other children. Children were seated one table away from each other and used earplugs to hear the game sound and to diminish distraction. Master’s degree students gave instructions about MindLight and supervised the groups. CBT The CBT program used in the current study was an adaptation of Kendall’s Coping Cat (Flannery-Schroeder et al., 2005; Van Starrenburg et al., 2017). It is one of the few CBT prevention programs for children with elevated anxiety symptoms that focuses on anxiety-specific symptoms, emphasizes exposure and is freely accessible (Van Starrenburg et al., 2017). Specifically, a shortened eight-session (9 h) Dutch version of the indicated prevention group-based version of Van Starrenburg et al., (2017) was given. In this program, children are
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