I’m glad that we made a game teaching CBT knowledge, even if it focuses on cognitive distortions only. What’s more, I’m glad that we made one where people could feel (relatively) safe learning CBT in a group of strangers/acquaintances. A brief history of my investment in the topic:
In 2021 I was treated for a number of conditions for the first time in my life, and what surprised me most was that psychiatric recovery and growth meant learning — learning as in workbooks, diagrams, lectures, note-taking, and practice. I entered a program where I received an education on how to understand my emotions and thoughts, how to use knowledge to care for myself, what a healthy relationship looks like, etc. The skills and knowledge imparted to me were derived from CBT and DBT. Many times I have found myself filling out a CBT thought record to get to the bottom of a negative mood, until healthy thinking patterns became my norm. I also kept a personal health cheatsheet to remind myself of skills I could employ, when to use them, and stashed healthy thoughts, behaviors, and plans to use during times of crisis.
No matter who you are, and whether you identify as disabled or not, wellness is a skill, and there are scientists who have done amazing work developing self-help techniques we can administer to ourselves, without a therapist in the room. Games are great at teaching skills, so I was very serious about actually imparting knowledge to our players.
Among other things, I did the research of looking into what worksheets and skills helped me the most during my treatment, that I felt confident about teaching. We ended up going with teaching the cognitive distortions because they were clearly defined, well-documented, yet slightly more difficult to apply. Sadly we didn’t have enough of a sample size to do any real science, but I was curious to know whether our players would actually think of the cognitive distortions outside of our game, and apply it to their own thoughts. Long-term retention/ adaptation of desired behavior was our goal. I made three surveys for participants to fill out, and sent one out a day after they played the game (though I would have liked to send it out one week later, but couldn’t because of the timeline).
Something else that I noticed, was people very often mistake condolences for empathy, in their attempts to “treat” their bug patient; this is ineffective in the real world, so if I were to continue to work on this, that would be an issue to tackle. I also didn’t anticipate the shame that some players may have been feeling shame and discomfort about learning therapy skills (I am not sure, but I remember feeling similar shame when I started treatment.) And so I hope people in the future can keep making games to spread science-based self-help skills, but also create games to de-stigmatize them too.
