Towards An Angry-Birds-like Game System for Promoting Mental Well-being of Players Using Art-Therapy-embedded PCG

TL;DR

This paper introduces a game system combining art therapy and procedural content generation, where players' drawings influence game levels and receive positive feedback to promote mental well-being.

Contribution

It presents a novel integrated system that generates game levels from player drawings and provides therapeutic feedback to enhance mental health.

Findings

System successfully generates game levels from drawings

Provides positive feedback to improve player emotions

Integrates art therapy principles into game design

Abstract

This paper presents an integration of a game system and the art therapy concept for promoting the mental well-being of video game players. In the proposed game system, the player plays an Angry-Birds-like game in which levels in the game are generated based on images they draw. Upon finishing a game level, the player also receives positive feedback (praising words) toward their drawing and the generated level from an Art Therapy AI. The proposed system is composed of three major parts: (1) a drawing recognizer that identifies what object is drawn by the player (Sketcher), (2) a level generator that converts the drawing image into a pixel image, then a set of blocks representing a game level (PCG AI), and (3) the Art Therapy AI that encourages the player and improves their emotion. This paper describes an overview of the system and explains how its major components function.