The Trauma Treatment Game: Design Constraints for Serious Games in Psychotherapy

Abstract

Serious games deliver interactive worlds in support of a wide range of application areas. Addressing the current paucity of scientific empirical studies in game-based psychotherapy, we address scientific and methodological challenges and their implications for the design of serious games for this domain. We do so in the context of a comprehensive multistage design process that preceded the final game concept of the "Trauma Treatment Game", a serious game to support individualised interventions to children of age eight to twelve suffering from trauma.