Designing Virtual Reality Games for Grief: A Workshop Approach with Mental Health Professionals

TL;DR

This paper presents the design of a VR game called 'Road to Acceptance' aimed at helping patients cope with grief through immersive storytelling, and describes a workshop-based evaluation with mental health professionals to assess its therapeutic potential.

Contribution

It introduces a novel VR game focused on grief processing and proposes a workshop method for evaluating its clinical appropriateness and therapeutic impact.

Findings

Insights into how VR can facilitate emotional processing of grief

Guidelines for designing effective grief-related VR experiences

Preliminary validation of the game's therapeutic potential

Abstract

Although serious games have been increasingly used for mental health applications, few explicitly address coping with grief as a core mechanic and narrative experience for patients. Existing grief-related digital games often focus on clinical training for medical professionals rather than immersive storytelling and agency in emotional processing for the patient. In response, we designed Road to Acceptance, a VR game that presents grief through first-person narrative and gameplay. As the next phase of evaluation, we propose a workshop-based study with 12 licensed mental health professionals to assess the therapeutic impacts of the game and the alignment with best practices in grief education and interventions. This will inform iterative game design and patient evaluation methods, ensuring that the experience is clinically appropriate. Potential findings can contribute to the design principles of grief-related virtual reality experiences, bridging the gap between interactive media, mental health interventions, and immersive storytelling.