Development of a Gamified Intervention for Children with Autism to Enhance Emotional Understanding Abilities

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a complex neurodevelopmental disorder that manifests behaviorally in early childhood and persists through life. As digital natives, today's children grow up with video games and digital technologies. Digital games have been validated helpful for neuropsychiatric disorders, and they are a very suitable form to engage children. This paper presents an upcoming study which aims to investigate computer games as an alternative for treating behavior and neuropsychiatric disorders. It will study the use of computer games that include emotionally charged scenarios as an intervention for autistic children, especially enhancing their emotional understanding abilities. Players’ emotional response is an amazing and fundamental aspect of computer gaming experience, which is very difficult for traditional media to both trigger and capture. In addition, computer games can make greater use of player motivation, a key tool for helping ASD sufferers (especially children) concentrate on a specific task, and most studies reported positive outcomes. This study will develop a computer game for ASD therapy and then a pilot test will be conducted to validate the game intervention. The outcome of this project will contribute to the gamification studies for health and wellbeing by building a concrete design case to assist children with autism with empirical evaluation. The unique value proposition is the use of computer game to provide an engaging, effective, economic and low-side effect intervention.