TY  - JOUR
AU  - Wehbe, Rina R
AU  - Whaley, Colin
AU  - Eskandari, Yasaman
AU  - Suarez, Ally
AU  - Nacke, Lennart E
AU  - Hammer, Jessica
AU  - Lank, Edward
PY  - 2022
DA  - 2022/5/19
TI  - Designing a Serious Game (Above Water) for Stigma Reduction Surrounding Mental Health: Semistructured Interview Study With Expert Participants
JO  - JMIR Serious Games
SP  - e21376
VL  - 10
IS  - 2
KW  - human–computer interaction
KW  - games for change
KW  - games for mental health
KW  - sensitive topics
KW  - game design
KW  - empirical analysis
KW  - expert participants
AB  - Background: Although in many contexts unsuccessful games targeting learning, social interaction, or behavioral change have few downsides, when covering a sensitive domain such as mental health (MH), care must be taken to avoid harm and stigmatization of people who live with MH conditions. As a result, evaluation of the game to identify benefits and risks is crucial in understanding the game’s success; however, assessment of these apps is often compared with the nongame control condition, resulting in findings specifically regarding entertainment value and user preferences. Research exploring the design process, integrating field experts, and guidelines for designing a successful serious game for sensitive topics is limited. Objective: The aim of this study is to understand which elements of game design can guide a designer when designing a game for sensitive topics. Methods: To carefully probe the design space of serious games for MH, we present Above Water (AbW), a game targeting the reduction of stigma surrounding MH, now in its second iteration. The game, AbW, serves as a consistent research probe to solicit expert feedback. Experts were recruited from a range of topic domains related to MH and wellness, game design, and user experience. Results: By using this deployment as a research probe, this study demonstrates how to synthesize gained insights from multiple expert perspectives and create actionable guidelines for successful design of serious games targeting sensitive topics. Conclusions: Our work contributes to a better understanding of how to design specialized games to address sensitive topics. We present a set of guidelines for designing games for sensitive subjects, and for each guideline, we present an example of how to apply the finding to the sample game (AbW). Furthermore, we demonstrate the generalizability to other sensitive topics by providing an additional example of a game that could be designed with the presented guidelines. 
SN  - 2291-9279
UR  - https://games.jmir.org/2022/2/e21376
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2196/21376
UR  - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35588056
DO  - 10.2196/21376
ID  - info:doi/10.2196/21376
ER  -