MIND GAMES

How developers, scientists and business leaders are wrestling with the complicated prospect of games as tools for mental health

- EDWIN EVANS-THIRLWELL

What are the mental health impacts of landing a headshot in a first-person shooter? If you go by tabloid headlines – or, more reasonably, the studies that indicate short-term correlations between certain game mechanics and aggression – you might say it cultivates and rewards bloodlust. But you could also argue, citing research into the causes of clinical anxiety, that a headshot fulfills a more innocent, albeit macabre desire for closure. “Your task is done, you no longer need to worry about that part of the world, and you can move on to the next,” as FuturLab founder and CEO James Marsden observes.

While no scholar of mental health himself, Marsden feels that much the same basic need for “finality” underpins FuturLab’s PowerWash Simulator, one of several projects which suggest that playing videogames can have therapeutic benefits. A game about hosing down mucky level maps, released via the Square Enix Collective, PowerWash Simulator is “sort of doing headshots on every pixel at 60 frames per second”. Every blast of water alters the world unambiguously, making it ‘safe’ to move on. “It gets you into this flow state really, really quickly,” Marsden says. “And it’s got this perfect difficulty curve, completely by accident, where the first mark you make is the easiest you’ll ever make, and as you progress towards the end, you’re trying to find that last bit of dirt, and it just ramps up.”