286 Chapter 6 DISCUSSION The current study examines an important, rarely addressed, factor in the potential success of therapeutic games: how we present and promote therapeutic games. With the number of interactive media interventions for mental health growing rapidly, it is vital to understand how these interventions are going to be accepted outside of research and clinical settings. Messaging and Game Choice Our findings show that young adults with mild to severe mental health symptoms were almost four times more likely to select a game when it was explicitly promoted as beneficial for mental health compared to when it was promoted as entertaining. The most important conclusion we can draw from these results is that explicit mental health messaging did not deter young adults with mild to severe mental health symptoms from selecting a game, but in fact made the game more appealing to select. Overall, nearly 60% of participants selected the game they believed to be a mental health game. Given that regular professional help is sought by only approximately a quarter to a third of people with a diagnosable disorder (Alonso et al., 2004; Merikangas et al., 2011), it is encouraging that in a sample with elevated mental health symptoms three in five young adults showed interest in playing a game that purported to benefit their mental health. Additionally, the results show that participants were almost six times more likely to select the game promoted with the mental health message in the detailed trailer as they were to select the mental health message in the abstract trailer. In our attempt to create two distinguishable trailers for the same video game we unintentionally created a version that was perceived as more attractive and fun. Although not manipulated as such, this incidental finding may suggest that both trailer messaging and trailer design are important factors in game choice. Accordingly, mental health games will likely be more successful if their trailer design is equally as appealing or even more appealing than the design of commercial videogames. Furthermore, exploratory results show that symptom type did not predict game choice, suggesting that results are not specific to disorders and apply to internalising issues in general. Interestingly, the same is found for symptom severity. Thus, youth with more severe symptoms were not more likely to turn to a mental health game, while most other studies indicate that people with severe symptoms are more likely to seek professional help (Merikangas et al., 2011; Sawyer et al., 2012). However, our result is in line with other studies
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