Summer Dev Blog – Intro June 3, 2009 at 11:38 am
- Sailor’s Sky – Siobhan Forrester
It’s officially summer, and that means only one thing for college students like me: summer jobs. Last year, I had the wonderful experience of interning at EALA for the summer, and I was kind of hoping to return to EA this year. Unfortunately, economies tank, people have sudden changes in where they want their career to head, and internship slots close quickly, so I’m not actually at EA or any sort of Triple A studio this year. That doesn’t mean that I’m not incredibly happy about where I ended up, though. And that also doesn’t mean I don’t get to design games this summer, either. That’s right, I’m finally getting the chance to build my chops as a designer, and at one of the strangest places you could ever find a game designer: a hospital.
The games I’m working on this summer are a part of an experimental research project involving therapeutic uses for video games. Now, I know what you’re thinking: “Serious games? Lame.” Generally, I’d agree with you on that. But one of the central theories behind this particular project is that if you make a therapeutic game fun, the subjects will actually want to go to therapy. It makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? People generally don’t like therapy because it’s not fun. But if you make it fun, people like it, and their condition improves faster.
Another central idea to the project is that fun videogames can be really useful to treat symptoms of Autism Spectrum Disorder. Children with ASD tend to gravitate toward computers and videogames, so it makes sense to use them as a therapeutic tool. The difficult thing is to figure out how to extract some benefit from the games they play. There has been some research into this, and as it turns out, asking children with ASD to make distinctions between different human faces and human emotions has a certain amount of therapeutic value. This is where my job starts. As part of the research team, I’m responsible for designing and creating Flash games for use in this project. The games can be anything, from strategy to puzzle to RPG-based, but they all must include the central concept of making distinctions between faces. It’s a lot easier than you’d think, mostly because requiring that core idea gives me a base off of which I can build a design, but it’s still rather difficult.
But beyond the challenges, I think my favorite part of this job will be the chance to use games to help people. Since last summer, I’ve decided that one of my goals in life is to create a game that is fun and entertaining, but also makes a significant impact on the world. Games are so popular and so embedded in our culture that I can’t help but wonder if there is a better purpose for them. The problem I see, though, is that any game that tries to do good for the world often loses sight of the reason most people play games in the first place: the fun. A game like that which is fun would be like therapy for the world: its effect would be amplified by the fact that people want to play it simply because it is fun. This job is letting me make almost exactly that, and I can’t express how exciting it is.
