Our Research
We also contribute cutting edge research for well-being, engagement and mental health advocacy.
Story-led open-world games as interventions for anxiety.
Barriers to care
Many people do not receive the support they need. Between 35% and 50% of those affected in developed countries, and 76% to 85% in developing countries, receive no treatment. In the UK, as many as 75% of people with mental health problems may not access the care they require.
Individuals wait an average of 10 years to receive effective treatment, and more than 120,000 people have waited over eight weeks for a second appointment. Mental health also accounts for only 6% of research funding.
Mental health difficulties affect a substantial share of the global population, with one in four people worldwide experiencing such issues in any given year. Globally, around 300 million people live with depression and more than 260 million experience anxiety disorders.
In the UK, 16 million people are affected by mental illness. These conditions carry a substantial economic cost through lost productivity, estimated at $1 trillion each year worldwide and £40 billion annually in UK workplaces.
Applied design research that explored the potential of developing serious games – specifically games incorporating storytelling features and virtual environmental exploratory experiences – for use as therapeutic interventions to address General Anxiety Disorder (GAD).
The research was grounded in the documentation of a systematic programme of Research-through-Design practice across a desk-based review and three empirical studies, which followed a pragmatic human-centred design approach guiding an agile development and user testing of a novel prototype intervention.
Clinical experts in mental health were consulted to articulate design considerations that informed and inspired the development of a prototype that was then developed iteratively and evaluated with a diverse user sample of anxiety symptom lived experience.
This research provide the foundations for a new framework for GAD and potential effective application in clinical therapeutic interventions, addressing a current gap in design research on clinician-guided digital mental health technologies.
Specifically, this research framework provides new conceptualisations and possibilities for designing game modularity and flexible configuration. The software developed as part of this research provides the demonstrator of this novel design space and the resultant software a proof-of-concept; and the studies deliver design strategies and recommendations for developing serious game features and narrative (diegetic) elements.
What we built
A serious game for general anxiety built on the first-person open world storytelling genre. It grew out of a clinician-informed design process on reshaping the walking simulator as an intervention. Psychologists and psychiatrists were consulted before prototyping. The development of Mind Walk involved rigorous in depth multidisciplinary studies with potential users.
The development of the intervention (Mind Walk) followed a staged, evidence-informed process that began with clinician input. These expert insights were used to iterate an initial game design that translated the professional clinical recommendations into practical interactive features.
The translation of abstract clinical guidance to something usable by people experiencing generalised anxiety disorder is rarely straightforward and may not work as intended in practice, the early version was then tested and developed with users who came with lived experience. Feedback from those sessions generated further design refinements that fed into intervention game iterations.
Read the full research article here.
This work served as a necessary precursor to larger studies, establishing an initial evidence base for MW’s acceptability and perceived benefits. The current evaluation examines the design more formally with a larger group of participants, providing an early assessment of how well MW is received and what benefits users report. In doing so, it addresses core feasibility considerations used in digital mental health research for anxiety interventions.