Better Living through Software

Can a properly-designed video game be effective in treating some forms of depression? I say yes. I believe that this theory deserves a clinical trial or two, and am wondering how to locate and match researcher with funding. Researchers in the area will be familiar with the relevant prior research:

• Clinical depression iscorrelated with decreased size, number of neurons, etc. in hippocampus and caudate nucleus


• Size of hippocampus is variable, and you can cause a person’s hippocampus to grow


• Cabbies in London have large hippocampuses and have lower incidence of depression


• Studies with humans on computer simulation and rats in mazes have shown that navigation tasks (such as driving a cab) activate hippocampus and caudate nucleus


• Several studies have narrowed down the specific activities which are most effective in activating both areas of the brain

So the natural hypothesis is this — if you can exercise the brain to grow specific areas of the brain implicated in depression, you can directly combat depression. As far as I am aware, nobody has ever tested this hypothesis scientifically, but I believe it has a strong chance of succeeding.

To test the hypothesis, you need a way to ?exercise? hippocampus and caudate nucleus. One easy test would be to take 100 depressed volunteers and send 50 of them off to be cabbies in London. But this has obvious problems.Oneway to make a moreisolated test would be with a video game designed to target these areas of the brain as much as possible. The research suggests that the ideal game would include:

• Interesting enough to have high motivation factor. Activation requires the person to ?push? a bit.


• Navigation involves variety of landmarks


• Navigation in 3D; landmarks viewed from all angles


• Navigation requires mixture of novel route traversal (spawn at a fresh point, figure out how to get to new point) and memorized route traversal.


• Enough variety in maps to avoid complete memorization, but enough stability to allow person to succeed frequently at landmark and memory navigation.


• Difficulty level adjustable so that difficulty mastering the game does not oughtweigh exposure to the navigation tests.

Halo 2 on Xbox live already has a good mix of these characteristics, and may even activate those areas of the brain better than driving cab in London would. This would be easy enough to verify with a few brain scans. So here is a rough draft at what a research proposal could look like:

• Take 100 volunteers who rank at a certain range on the scale for depression


• Have 50 ofthem play Halo 2 on Xbox Live for 1 hour per day, 5 days per week. Use ladder play in a variety of games to control difficulty anddiscourage memorization.


• Have the other 50 of them play a game which exercises reflexes, but involves no navigation, route-finding, or landmarks. There are several such games that could be used as control.


• Make sure none of them plays any other games; as a control.


• Have them fill out the surveys every two weeks for 90 days. See who moves on the scale.

Of course, you could take brain scans as well, but the above is pretty cheap and has a 90% chance of getting positive correlation, IMO. Then I would run the study again with the control group taking 5-HTP or an SSRI. Just imagine the impact on Microsoft stock if USA Today reported that ?Halo 2 is as effective as prozac at treating some forms of depression?. Assuming my theory is correct, Halo 2 might not be the game, but it wouldn’t be long until we had one that was.

~

In the past week, three of the most famous Japanese game developers have signedexclusively with Microsoft. Xbox 2 is going to be incredible.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 4th, 2005 at 5:14 am and is filed under possibilities. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.