Aniek Wols

6 261 EXPLICIT MESSAGING PROMOTES GAME SELECTION Video games are immensely popular among youth (Lenhart et al., 2008; Entertainment Software Association, 2017). Consequently, the idea to capitalize on this popularity and to use games to teach youth skills is thriving (Wilkinson et al., 2008; Sardi et al., 2017; Dias et al., 2018). Serious games are designed to teach knowledge, skill or behaviour change and may be used to promote mental well-being in youth (Lau et al., 2017). Mental health games can be offered as tools to supplement standard therapy or as a replacement of schoolbased prevention programs (e.g., Fernández-Aranda et al., 2012; Schoneveld et al., 2018). However, the potential for impact may be far greater. Mental health games may be used to promote overall well-being in the general population, to offer light interventions to people with mild mental health symptoms or to reach individuals with clinical disorders who are not seeking professional help. Whether or not serious games can reach such diverse populations may in part be determined by how games are presented. Therefore, the aim of the current study was to test how messaging used to promote therapeutic games affects the game choice of youth and their experience of gameplay outside of a therapeutic context. Our focus in the current study was on youth as they are both avid consumers of video games (Entertainment Software Association, 2017) and particularly vulnerable to the development of psychological disorders (Merikangas et al., 2010). The idea to capitalize on the popularity of video games stems from the attraction and engagement of video games. The potential that using games for therapeutic purposes holds has researchers and therapists excited for several reasons. Specifically, games may: (1) get youth motivated to learn skills; (2) attract and retain youth in therapy programs; (3) help youth persevere throughout therapy’s strenuous process, similar to persisting in a difficult game level; (4) help youth realistically practice and (5) facilitate internalisation and generalisation of new skills (see e.g., Granic et al., 2014; Buday, 2015; Fleming et al., 2017). Although immensely challenging, creating games in which the therapeutic aim and engagement of game design enhance each other has some precedence. One example is MindLight, an effective anxiety reduction game that successfully evokes anxiety during gameplay, trains regulation of these anxious feelings, and engages children to the level that they would recommend the game to others as much as they would recommend a commercial game (Schoneveld et al., 2016, 2018). With this engagement potential of therapeutic games, it would be a shame to have mental health games only be played as part of a therapy protocol rather than reaching billions of people who enjoy commercial video games (Meeker, 2017).

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