Designing More Engaging Serious Games to Support Students' Mental Health: A Pilot Study Based on A CBT-Informed Design Framework

TL;DR

This study introduces a novel design framework for serious games aimed at improving mental health education among students, demonstrating increased engagement and motivation through a pilot trial.

Contribution

It proposes the TPR-MMF framework for designing engaging mental health games and validates its effectiveness with a prototype in a small randomized trial.

Findings

Experimental group showed higher motivation scores than control.

Players perceived psychological metaphors and related to real-life experiences.

The game design increased engagement in mental health education.

Abstract

Addressing the issues of dullness, low compliance, and lack of appeal in current digital mental health education and serious games for students and adolescents, this study proposes a novel, experience-centered framework for serious game design: the Therapeutic Procedural Rhetoric and Mechanism Mapping Framework (TPR-MMF). Based on this framework, a side-scrolling serious game prototype, "World + You - World," was developed. This study compared the effectiveness of TPR-MMF-based games with traditional explicit educational serious games through a small-sample randomized controlled trial (N=28). The results of the Intrinsic Motivation Inventory (IMI) showed that the experimental group (playing "World + You - World") significantly outperformed the control group in four aspects. Furthermore, qualitative survey results indicated that players could perceive the psychological metaphors within the game mechanics and spontaneously resonated with real-life experiences. This study provides a highly engaging new development paradigm for gamified mental health education for students and adolescents.