Online CBC Innovation Breakfast: Harnessing the potential of video game design for psychiatry

Paul Fletcher, PhD – Bernard Wolfe Professor of Health Neuroscience and Honorary Consultant Psychiatrist with the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Trust

In this talk, Paul Fletcher will describe the establishment of video games as a medium for representing a huge range of human experience and behaviour has been accompanied by breathtaking advances in their sophistication and realism. The cognitive and clinical neurosciences have begun to harness their remarkable power to represent and to engage players in rich participatory experiences. We can also go beyond this and use their power to engage as a way of challenging and measuring players’ cognitive traits and abilities. Excitingly, there is also the possibility of incorporating them into the therapeutic process by exploiting their potential for learning and behaviour change.

He will describe his recent work using game design within virtual reality as a way of helping people to regulate their physiological responses to stress and thereby to manage experiences of anxiety.

Paul Fletcher is Bernard Wolfe Professor of Health Neuroscience and Honorary Consultant Psychiatrist with the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Trust as well as a Wellcome Investigator. He has collaborated with Ninja Theory, the Cambridge-based video game design studio, for 10 years and was part of the BAFTA-winning team that created games representing the experience of psychosis.

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