Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Serious Games
Date Submitted: Aug 25, 2022
Open Peer Review Period: Aug 25, 2022 - Oct 20, 2022
Date Accepted: Jul 15, 2023
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
The development of game-based digital mental health interventions: An integrative framework bridging the paradigms of healthcare and entertainment
ABSTRACT
Game-based approaches are increasingly used to improve user engagement of digital mental health interventions (DMHI) while specific game mechanics may yield therapeutic effects per se and thereby contribute to DMHI efficacy. Yet, game-based interventions have seen only limited commercial usage. We suggest that the challenges reflect the tension between the two underlying paradigms—healthcare and entertainment—that have disparate goals, and consequently, different approaches to intervention development. We describe three approaches currently used to negotiate the paradigms: gamification of healthcare software, designing serious games, and purpose-shifting existing entertainment games. We advance an integrative TEME framework to support the research and development of these game-based digital mental health interventions (gDMHI). The framework focuses on the interdependencies between the Target audience, user Engagement, the Mechanisms of action, and health-related Effectiveness. On each theme, we exhibit how the two paradigms complement each other. We elaborate the framework by considering its implications through the development from concept to production.
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© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.