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Common PC Video Games Used To Treat Phobias 184

Posted by michael from the fear-of-railguns dept.
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."
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Common PC Video Games Used To Treat Phobias More

Common PC Video Games Used To Treat Phobias

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  • I feel an attack of dukenukemforeverphobia coming on....and I think my halflife2phobia is also playing up...

    Unfortunately, doctors have told me that my dukenukemforeverphobia may be incurable, but halflife2phobia has a cure on the way, even though the secret formula has leaked out.
  • is "The Sims", treating the "Having a Real Life" syndrome.

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday October 17, 2003 @06:38PM (#7245336)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • I think they should make mod to get over your ph34r of head crabs...headcrab in cage and u with every weapon in game .....mmmmmm
    • well im afraid, after playing splinter cell, that since i cant shoot out the lights at work, i may be seen just standing there....in my black suit with a sticky cam by the boss's door.
  • In Half-life, the spiders often win. That can't be good for the patient, can it?

  • 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...

    ___________
    • I have some quite big problems with phobias. Supposedly. It's more generalised anxiety/panic disorder. Not so bad if I'm working away doing some of the few things I'm able to without anxiety, but watching fiction and playing almost all computer games brings on anxiety as much as anything else that'll pull me undone - that includes just going outside.

      Oddly enough, The Sims is quite a fun little distraction. Perhaps because I lock my sims in their houses and don't let them out, make them live with fifteen ca
    • A phobia is, by definition, an IRRATIONAL fear. It is rational to fear dying. Also a phobia is generally speaking an exagerated response. So if you were archnophobic you might be paralized (literally) with fear at the sight of a tarantula. This is not rational, a tarantual poses no threat to you. You could kill it with no effort, and even if it wanted to attack you, it could do almost no damage. Also the fear response is highly exagerated. Most of the time, even when faced with a life threatening situation,
  • Now I can get treatment for my shot-with-a-bfg phobia, or my falling-off-the-edge-of-the-map phobia.

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday October 17, 2003 @06:42PM (#7245370)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Slashdot? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Valar ( 167606 ) on Friday October 17, 2003 @06:42PM (#7245373)
    Slashdot helped me overcome my fear of shiny objects and obscure technologies. Thank you /.!
  • How come these guys (who run high-tech simulators) are totally unable to present anything better than a 16-colour logo [gatech.edu]?

  • So... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by oGMo ( 379 ) on Friday October 17, 2003 @06:43PM (#7245379)

    So, what do they use to treat Luposlipaphobia?

  • Duh! (Score:5, Funny)

    by neostorm ( 462848 ) on Friday October 17, 2003 @06:43PM (#7245380)
    Japanese Dating Sims have been helping adolescent men combat their fear of approaching the opposite sex for years now!

    • Re:Duh! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Lord_Dweomer ( 648696 ) on Friday October 17, 2003 @08:09PM (#7245815) Homepage
      While your comment was obviously a joke, I wonder if there will one day be software that could do just that. Not every guy can go out to the mall and approach 10 girls to build his confidence. A virtual reality dating sim might be able to help him do just that. And before someone makes a crack about my comment, realize that it is increasingly common in this day and age for boys to not feel confident enough to approach girls, so this is a real problem that needs some solutions.

      • OK, problem is common, ok, realized.

        now for the crack!

        "Not every guy can go out to the mall and approach 10 girls to build his confidence."

        Ya missed out "year-old" between "10" and "girls".

        graspee

      • It's not the guy's fault, if his intentions are good. But a lot of guys are assholes, and girls realize that. Look at the Kobe Bryant case for a different scenario. Basically the bad guys ruin it for everyone else. You already have one strike against you, you're a guy.

        Obviously, this is not always true. I'm just pointing out why guys aren't as "confident" like in the past.
        • " It's not the guy's fault, if his intentions are good. But a lot of guys are assholes, and girls realize that. Look at the Kobe Bryant case for a different scenario. Basically the bad guys ruin it for everyone else. You already have one strike against you, you're a guy."

          Actually, its the "bad" guys who usually get the girl. Go figure.

          • Actually, its the "bad" guys who usually get the girl. Go figure.

            How right you are. And how my life change for the better once I understood this. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go buy some more condoms and cigarettes.
    • Those might also help with Puritansim, the haunting fear that somewhere, someone may be happy. (Apologies to H. L. Mencken, especially if I've misspelled his name)

  • What's convenient is... (Score:3)

    by mgcsinc ( 681597 ) on Friday October 17, 2003 @06:44PM (#7245383)
    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...

    • No (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Sycraft-fu ( 314770 )
      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 eas

      • Re:No (Score:2)

        by Reziac ( 43301 )
        My mom (not otherwise an overreactive person) is the same way about snakes. She will actually scream and leap onto the nearest high object at the sight of one, and there is absolutely no getting sense out of her until the snake is out of sight. It doesn't matter that she knows the snake is harmless.

        Her reaction looks exactly like what wild monkeys do when they see a predadory snake. I'd guess it's genetically hardwired behaviour, but over millennia has been diluted down to "ugh, squish it" in most people.

      • Neurobiology of phobia (Score:2, Informative)

        by UpnAtom ( 551727 )
        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
  • Another game that can be used to treat another phobia: the fear of using a badly made product.

    Controlled exposure to Daikatana (this has to be carefully regulated) should lower people's expectations of what they use, and thus feel better when being forced to use something poorly made.
  • Anyone for a game to help get rid of fear of commitment issues?
    • The Sims. I'm sure the have an expansion for horny-college-kid, and the later developmental stage of picking a wife that's right for me. The problem is, you aren't going to find a wife that can keep up with your desire to read slashdot instead of making sweet love.
  • They were treated to Barbie goes shopping so they can survive the long shopping trips with the wife/gf

    Rus

  • Sounds good... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by miketang16 ( 585602 ) on Friday October 17, 2003 @06:52PM (#7245439) Journal
    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...
    • I agree... I work in a high stress environment and often unwinding for an hour with GTAVC keeps the lil' stress demon at bay.

      Zero stress headaches, no more dreading yet another day of fixing problems for people who caused the problem (read tech support), etc...

      Either that or a phat joint!
    • All this reminds me of the title of a review of X-com from way back: "Work out that nagging xenophobia problem!"
  • But what can they do about papaphobia [changethatsrightnow.com]?
  • So... what video game do you play if you have a fear of video games?
    • " So... what video game do you play if you have a fear of video games?"

      Well you start nice and slow, by watching other people playing Pong and Spacewar through a window, then in the same room. You then watch them playing Frogger, Pacman, DigDug and Missile Command, then gradually move on up to 3d, then texture-mapping etc. Finally you can be persuaded to take the controls yourself.

      graspee

  • Will Tomb Raider help me overcome my fear of girls?

    Couldn't help myself.
  • Anyone who would have seen me at 12 playing Mega Man 2 would realize I was phobic of heights. Remember AirMan? The one that would fling little tornados at you? Hell. His level was terrifying for me. I just couldn't handle falling.

    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 m

  • I've lived with acrophobia all my life. While it might be possible to treat it with video games, I think I'll just keep my phobia, thank you. I've learned to deal with it (I've flown over the Atlantic 13 times) and would probably miss it if it were gone.
    • Do you ever get that vertiginous pit in your stomach when your character falls from a great height? It surprises me that I can have such a visceral reaction to what's happening on a computer monitor.
      • visceral reaction to what's happening on a computer monitor

        I miss the feeling I got when I first played Doom. When one of those fire-throwing monsters would jump out of the shadows at me, I could feel the hackles rise on the back of my neck. The same kind of feeling you get when you go into an empty room and know you're not alone, or step into a forest at night and feel the fingers of something trace down your back.

        Now I'm too jaded on the FPS. I still play them, but not with the same kind of sense o

      • Yep, I've gotten it playing Deus Ex. (I think that's the first time that's happened too, that game is the 1st one I've played that's so immersive.)

  • What I wanna know is (Score:4, Funny)

    by El ( 94934 ) on Friday October 17, 2003 @06:59PM (#7245496)
    what phobia does Tomb Raider treat, and why do so many geeks suffer from it?

  • It works! (Score:4, Funny)

    by RecoveredMarketroid ( 569802 ) on Friday October 17, 2003 @07:01PM (#7245501)
    Grand Theft Auto cured me of my phobia of going to prison for running over pedestrians...
  • 5 years of pac man and im still afraid of ghosts. 10 years of tetris and im still afraid of falling bricks. probably even moreso.
  • Doom gave me a phobia of giant mechanized spiders with frikkin laser-beams on their foreheads. The incessant omni-directional sound of grinding gears sneaking up on you still give me the willies!
  • Fear of snow: Tux Racer
    Fear of killer robots: Gnobots
    Fear of cats: Wing Commander
  • So was Diakatana used to treat fear of failure?
  • Relates to stepping out of a teleporter and onto a mine... is there any work being done on this horrible affliction?
  • Everytime I think about HL, that one part where you're crawling around on the side of that mountain looking off in the canyon...

    Still makes my palms sweat.

  • Half-Life 2 will soon be used to cure the fear of products whose source code is completely out in the open.
  • I'll play the devil's advocate here...If video games can be used to treat such phobias, do the claims that they desensitize one to violence, making it more likely that they will commit violent acts, hold water?
    • do the claims that [video games] desensitize one to violence, making it more likely that they will commit violent acts, hold water?

      I'm not convinced that media desensitizes one to violence, nor am I convinced that desensitization increases the likelihood of violent behavior. That's not to say that media has no effect. Athletes, whether they like it or not, are role models: unnecessary roughness, head hunting, and fighting make violence seem acceptable. Don Johnson smoking next to a Ferrari makes cigarette

      • No, we do not. But like I said I was playing the devil's advocate. I'm not one of these guys who want to ban all videogames because of the innocent children. I love blasting the hell out of virtual opponents as much as anybody, and if anything I'm bitter that I keep getting schooled by said children. But this article got me to thinking that if they are using video games to condition fear response, what else could they be used for?
    • Treating a phobia is essentially desensitizing to the object of the phobia. IOW getting used to dealing with it, a little at a time. But these people WANT to be desensitized to spiders or whatever.

      Whereas most of us play violent video games to purposefully get scared half to death, and we can do that because we don't have an existing problem with an irrational fear of its subject matter. (Tomb Raider aside. :)

      It might therefore be argued that if anything, the net result is that violent video games tend to
  • Agoraphobics: AKA Dirty Rotten Campers.

    I'm all for curing them! We need to get them out in the open where we can frag their asses. :)

    --

  • me: sorry, i can't come into work today...i'm getting phobia therapy by video games.
    boss: oh, sorry to hear that. what is it that you are afraid of.
    me: zombies.
    boss: zombies?
    me: uh, yeah...terrified.
    boss: stop playing half life and get into work.

  • britney's dance beat got me over my fears of pop singers.
  • Duke Nukem Forever cured my phobia of vapor.

  • Worked for me. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Mr. Flibble ( 12943 ) on Friday October 17, 2003 @07:56PM (#7245765) Homepage
    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.
    • Aliens came out long after Video Stores were around - Alien however, is what I meant.
    • I saw Alien when I was about... oh 6 or 8. It scared the hell out of me, of course, and I had nightmares for years too.

      Anyway, that movie gave me the creeps until my late teens after having seen it another 20 times or so. Great horror movie! I don't think there's any other films that have scared me that much.

      Of course, even at such a young age, there was always something fun about having the shit scared out of you by a movie :)

      Cheers

    • That's what I was like with crack. I wasn't sure I'd like it, but now that I've smoked it about 37 times, I totally love it.

  • I used to be afraid of shotguns and blood splatter. But I'm better now.

    Really.
  • Videogames may help cure acrophobia, but it'll just instill new fears in you, mainly kakorrhaphiophobia and thanatophobia (Phobias [phobialist.com])
  • Video games gave me fear of endless pits. Even though nothing is that endless here on Earth you're just afraid to instantly die if you jump in instead of falling forever =)
  • 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.
  • I can believe some of these games might help, but to be honest I ended up more freaked out about spiders and anything spider related AFTER playing Aliens vs. Predator.

    Those damn face huggers scared the crap out of me in that game. I can honestly say that out of every game I've ever played (a lot), that is the only game where I was truly freaked out while playing. You'd be tooling along, minding your own business, while that creepy music and sound effect combo worked it's way into your brain.

    Then the ali
  • ...XBill!

    Monopolophobia?
    Insecuriphobia?
    Bluescreenapho bia?
    DelusionalBillionairephobia?

  • Persuasive computing (Score:2, Informative)

    by neves ( 324086 )
    Persuasive Computing [bfast.com] 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.
  • ..rumours that Counterstrike may be used to treat "fear of accute boredom" may be true...

    Scientists have known for years that the game can cure even acute cases of insomnia. It is hoped that the intense boredom generated by hiding behind a box for ten minutes sniping at other players hiding behind their boxes, will help patients confront their phobia.

    I can can personally vouch for the sleep inducing properties of CS - having often woken up to find myself on an empty map at 4am.

    One top researcher in the f
  • My biggest fear is being modded down as a troll for admitting that I fear being modded down as a troll.
  • Hopefully we can use this to treat overzealous politicians' fear of video games.

    Which reminds me of when I first got my original NES system: My mom didn't approve of the violence in Duck Hunt. That night I awoke to erie sounds, climbed out of bed, and made my way downstairs to find my mom enthralled by the game. She was really good at it too.

    She never complained about the game again.

  • The fear of boxes. Half-Life would work perfectly and that's just the single player game, wait till they install Box Wars.
  • I have a hard time playing games like Resident Evil and Silent Hill(some of the monsters are vey zombie-like). I guess I'm zombie-phobic, because they scare the shit outta me. So if I keep playing and get through them, I may be able to face real zombies a little easier?

    • So if I keep playing and get through them, I may be able to face real zombies a little easier?

      Not unless you play them in Smell-o-Vision. Zombies don't just LOOK bad after all.
  • So, say, half-life can cure arachnophobia. But didn't someone think it can induce paranoia or schizophrenia just as efficiently?
  • I just told her about this story and suggested we should get Half-Life to help her. Oddly enough, she fell for it.

    I should go through the game lists and make up a few phobias for myself.
  • According to video game critics, subjects of the recent video game phobia research study are now acting as if they are in the game, whenever their phobia surfaces.

    "Arachnophobic people have begun to carry shotguns around, to take care of spiders," said Officer Montoya. "Yeah," continued Office Bullock, "and those crazy people afraid of heights are now jumping off buildings when they don't feel like taking the stairs."

    The mother of one boy, formerly claustrophic, is suing the creators of Unreal Tournament,
  • the Leisure Suit Larry games are used to treat...

    This also reminds me of my then-girl friend and I playing Duke 3d. When we'd get done, she would be jittery and jumping around corners for 10 minutes.
  • What if they're afraid of VR or video games...talk about messin with their heads!

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