Slashdot Mirror
Common PC Video Games Used To Treat Phobias
NoData writes "Treating phobias with exposure therapy--gradually putting patients in fear-inducing situations, is a well-established method, even using virtual means, like VR simulators. However, now CNN is reporting on research that shows off-the-shelf PC video games can effectively treat phobias as well. Games like "Half-Life" were used to treat arachnophobia, and "Unreal Tournament" to treat acrophobia and claustrophobia."
What are they talking about? Half-life GAVE me arachnophobia. Now whenever I go through a dark narrow space, I start imagining huge spiders jumping up at me and gnawing at my head.
-- Dr. Eldarion --
There are some Phobias that are good to have. Personally I like my "fear of being shot in the face"-aphobia. It helps me stay alive. Which probably explains why I don't like FPSes...
___________
"Build a man a fire warm him for a day, set a man on fire and warm him for the rest of his life."
I find UT is the cure for my frequent attacks of workophobia. An application at lunch and at quitting time seems to correct the condition.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Slashdot helped me overcome my fear of shiny objects and obscure technologies. Thank you /.!
====
Crudely Drawn Games
So, what do they use to treat Luposlipaphobia?
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
Japanese Dating Sims have been helping adolescent men combat their fear of approaching the opposite sex for years now!
What's convenient is, when your attacked by a spider in a video game, you lose one of 15 remaining lives, and when you fall from extraordinary heights in Unreal, you end up with a little less health. It will be interesting to see if this will create a breed of former phobics who now fling themselves off buildings or into dens of black widow spiders under the misimpression that the damage done won't be too great...
I use Counter-Strike to treat my anger management issues. =D People complain that video games increase violent tendencies... bs... blowing up people's head is just what I need to relax after a hard day...
-------
"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
-- George Orwell
And the first level of Dr. Wily's castle where you were forced by the bastard scrolling to time jumps fluidly so you could get to the robotic dragon? I fell for an hours on end.
But as therapy for phobics? Hah. Am I getting in an airplane anytime soon? Hell no. Knock me out like Mr. T in the A-Team and I'll consider it.
what phobia does Tomb Raider treat, and why do so many geeks suffer from it?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Grand Theft Auto cured me of my phobia of going to prison for running over pedestrians...
Ok, this is a kind of a scary admission - especially for slashdot... Anyhow, here goes.
When I was about 6, my Dad got a pirated copy of Aliens (video stores did not exist at that time) and he sat down to watch it. I wanted to watch it with him (mistake!!!)
I had nightmares of the Alien, for years, and I always found it creepy - I hated even looking at H. R. Gigers Alien's. More recently, I picked up a copy of Alien vs. Predator - and I played through the entire game. It was difficult at first, but after getting used to killing Aliens (and being killed...) My fear went away. Irrational fear? Yes, but it was a fear I had none the less.
On a separate note, my friend saw The Exorcist when he was about 6 too, and he had nightmares about it. Recently he got the DVD extended version, and forced himself to watch it about 20 times. The movie no longer bothers him either.
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
Quake 2 cured my herpes!
Well, ok, it PREVENTED me from getting herpes. Or any other sexually transmitted disease and most airborne diseases.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Persuasive Computing is the title of a cool book of Stanford researcher B. J. Frogg, that discusses how computers can be used to change people behaviours. One of the examples are about using virtual reality to threat fobias.
Humans, at least adult humans, aren't simple creatures. You can tell them shit like "you will die if you fall off a building" and they will believe you. They don't have to try it themselves and die (there are also other psychological blocks preventing it).
A phobia is something special. A person has an irrational fear of something. They KNOW it is irrational, but they can't help it anyways. One of my friends is arachnophobic. He knows it's stupid, I mean he's big and spiders are small. He can crush them easily. He's not afraid of other bugs, I've seen him sqish cockroaches. However he is really afraid of spiders, even fake ones. It's not something he can logic away.
Well, that means you have to resort to alternate methods of curing a phobia. You can't just rationalize it away. If you try logic with a phobic they'll AGREE with you. They KNOW they are being rational, they just can't do anything about it. So you do things like expose them to things that cause the fear, but in small amounts. Slowly they get acclimated to that (if it works) and then you continue. Eventually you can eliminate the fear (again, provided it works for them, not all treatments work on all patients).
Well eliminating the fear isn't the same thing as making them a moron. Just because you cure someone's archnophobia doesn't mean they won't know that black widows are bad news and avoid them. All you'll have done is eliminated the automatic and uncontrollable fear response.
As a specialist in treating phobias, I can confirm your comments. Phobias are triggered by basic sensory input (usually sight), which is why people can be phobic of pictures of spiders.
Phobics actually have 2 simultaneous responses because there are 2 separate pathways in the brain. The faster one goes straight to the amygdala and the other via the visual/auditory cortex. It's this faster pathway which is the problem.
So a phobic will always feel fear first, and a split-second later can know that their response is irrational whilst being unable to do anything about it.
The only way to treat a phobic response is to retrain the amygdala, and can be done quickly (10 mins) and painlessly.
All of this goes out the window for anticipatory anxiety, which we can loosely define as a 'rational response to an irrational yet automatic thought.'
Eg those afraid of flying are convinced the plane is going to crash. The inside of their minds look like those airplane disaster movies. Retraining their amygdala would be akin to making them feel better about dying ie probably isn't going to work. Instead, you might edit those internal movies to make them unrealistic eg see everyone in the plane wearing bowler hats.