skip to main content
10.1145/3555858.3555917acmotherconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesfdgConference Proceedingsconference-collections
short-paper

Small, personal videogames about mental health: An informal survey of Bitsy games

Published: 04 November 2022 Publication History

Abstract

The article introduces an ongoing research project dedicated to short, personal videogames about mental health made using Bitsy: a tiny, browser-based game creation tool. It introduces preliminary observations from a survey of such games on the game distribution platform Itch.io. The article outlines the themes the games address and how they communicate their authors’ personal experiences and intended messages. It also discusses the significance of such games in the landscape of today’s gaming.

References

[1]
Luke Beardon. 2017. Autism and Asperger Syndrome in Adults. Sheldon Press, London.
[2]
Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort. 2008. New media as material constraint: An introduction to platform studies. In Electronic techtonics: Thinking at the interface. Proceedings of the First International HASTAC Conference, Erin Ennis, Zoë Marie Jones, Paolo Mangiafico, Mark Olson, Jennifer Rhee, Mitali Routh, Jonathan E. Tarr, and Brett Walters (Eds.). Lulu Press, Morrisville, NC, 176–193. https://hdl.handle.net/10161/9139
[3]
Hsiao-Wei Chen. 2021. Mental Jam: Video game co-creation for young people with lived experiences of depression and anxiety. Games for Change Asia-Pacific Journal 1, 2021 (2021), 177–203.
[4]
Hsiao-Wei Chen, Jonathan Duckworth, and Renata Kokanovic. 2022. Mental Jam: A Pilot Study of Video Game Co-creation for Individuals with Lived Experiences of Depression and Anxiety. In ArtsIT 2021: Proceedings of the 2021 International Conference on ArtsIT, Interactivity and Game Creation(Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering), Matthias Wölfel, Johannes Bernhardt, and Sonja Thiel (Eds.). Springer International Publishing, Cham, 120–137. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95531-1_9
[5]
Mu-Hong Chen, Han-Ting Wei, Li-Chi Chen, Tung-Ping Su, Ya-Mei Bai, Ju-Wei Hsu, Kai-Lin Huang, Wen-Han Chang, Tzeng-Ji Chen, and Ying-Sheue Chen. 2015. Autistic spectrum disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and psychiatric comorbidities: A nationwide study. Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders 10 (Feb. 2015), 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rasd.2014.10.014
[6]
Ruth Elisabeth Cole. 2022. Compassion Fatigue and Burnout: When Caring Becomes Too Much. DMin dissertation. Liberty University, Lynchburg, VA.
[7]
Manuela Ferrari, Sarah V. McIlwaine, Gerald Jordan, Jai L. Shah, Shalini Lal, and Srividya N. Iyer. 2019. Gaming With Stigma: Analysis of Messages About Mental Illnesses in Video Games. JMIR Mental Health 6, 5 (May 2019). https://doi.org/10.2196/12418
[8]
Mary Flanagan. 2009. Critical Play: Radical Game Design. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
[9]
Jane Friedhoff. 2013. Untangling Twine: A Platform Study. In DiGRA ’13 - Proceedings of the 2013 DiGRA International Conference: DeFragging Game Studies. DiGRA, 1–10. http://www.digra.org/digital-library/publications/untangling-twine-a-platform-study/
[10]
Sabine Harrer. 2019. Radical Jamming: Sketching Radical Design Principles for Game Creation Workshops. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Game Jams, Hackathons and Game Creation Events 2019(ICGJ 2019). ACM, New York, 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1145/3316287.3316297
[11]
Henry Jenkins. 2009. Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: Media education for the 21st century. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
[12]
Christian Sebastian Loh, Yanyan Sheng, and Dirk Ifenthaler. 2015. Serious games analytics: Theoretical framework. In Serious Games Analytics: Methodologies for Performance Measurement, Assessment, and Improvement, Christian Sebastian Loh, Yanyan Sheng, and Dirk Ifenthaler (Eds.). Springer, New York, 3–29.
[13]
Benjamin Nicoll. 2019. Minor Platforms in Videogame History. Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam. https://doi.org/10.1515/9789048540303
[14]
Anne E. Robbins. 2015. A role for media in reducing the stigma of mental illness. PhD dissertation. Alliant International University.
[15]
Annika Simon. 2020. The Mountains We Make: Eine medienästhetische Analyse psychischer Störungen in Celeste. In Krankheit in Digitalen Spielen: Interdisziplinäre Betrachtungen, Arno Görgen and Stefan Heinrich Simond (Eds.). transcript Verlag, Bielefeld, 189–210. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783839453285-010
[16]
Anna Stenning and Hanna Bertilsdotter Rosqvist. 2021. Neurodiversity studies: mapping out possibilities of a new critical paradigm. Disability & Society 36, 9 (Oct. 2021), 1532–1537. https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2021.1919503
[17]
Jonah Warren. 2019. Tiny online game engines. In 2019 IEEE Games, Entertainment, Media Conference (GEM). IEEE, New York, 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1109/GEM.2019.8901975
[18]
World Health Organization. 2017. Depression and other common mental disorders: global health estimates. Technical Report WHO/MSD/MER/2017.2. World Health Organization, Geneva. 24 pages. https://apps.who.int/iris/handle/10665/254610

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)"I Found it Cathartic": Exploring Empathy and Mental Health Awareness in Psychological Horror Video GamesProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36770838:CHI PLAY(1-21)Online publication date: 15-Oct-2024

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences
FDG '22: Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games
September 2022
664 pages
ISBN:9781450397957
DOI:10.1145/3555858
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 04 November 2022

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. game creation
  2. mental health
  3. participatory culture
  4. platform studies

Qualifiers

  • Short-paper
  • Research
  • Refereed limited

Conference

FDG22

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 152 of 415 submissions, 37%

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)29
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)2
Reflects downloads up to 27 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)"I Found it Cathartic": Exploring Empathy and Mental Health Awareness in Psychological Horror Video GamesProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36770838:CHI PLAY(1-21)Online publication date: 15-Oct-2024

View Options

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

HTML Format

View this article in HTML Format.

HTML Format

Figures

Tables

Media

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media