Games for Health 2013

This talk discusses Quit IT a project for teaching coping strategies for smoking cessation.  

For decades, the standard behavioral treatment for smoking urges has been behavioral rehearsal, which entails the identification, modeling, and role-playing of diverse cognitive and behavioral coping strategies to identify and manage smoking cues. This treatment promotes skill acquisition, bolsters confidence in coping with smoking cues, and reduces relapse to smoking.

In game vernacular, this skills acquisition approach is called “mastery” and is consistent with a gamer player’s experience as they advance through a variety of game genres such as Role Playing Games (RPGs). By enabling patients to interact with realistic environments, virtual reality environments are uniquely suited to engaging recent ex-smokers in skill-building activities for managing urges to smoke. Virtual reality games and simulations provide environments similar to those faced in the real world, which increases personal relevance and learning potential. With applications more diverse than entertainment, games serve as powerful tools because they encompass many aspects of human learning, such as engagement, problem-solving, receiving corrective feedback, and repetition.