Mempathy| Better Together
Better Together
Mempathy
Summary
Mempathy is a video game narrative experience that transforms the relationship with anxiety. The video game's goal is to offer a reflective experience by a feeling of advancement and companionship towards this mental health topic.
How I Addressed This Challenge
What did you develop ?
Mempathy is a serious video game that transform the relationship with anxiety : it produces a conversation in between the player and an artificial intelligent agent through a constellation progressive journey using Nasa Data Base Images.
" If Stars raise...so can you. "
Why is it important ?
Quality computer games have been shown to enhance concentration , improve retention of information , and bring about behavior change [1]. Over recent decades, computerized game-based approaches, both “serious games” and “gamification” have been developed for “serious” purposes: to educate, motivate, and/or persuade users, in educational, health, and other settings . The video game as a tool offers appealing, engaging and effective potential towards a goal.
Globally, ∼4.4% of the population is estimated to have depression and 3.6% anxiety disorders.Furthermore, depression is the single leading contributor to global disability (7.5% of all years lived with disability in 2015). As common mental disorders such as depressive disorders and anxiety disorders continue to rise, it is imperative to explore potential treatment approaches [2].
Although, evidence-based treatments exist, there is no one size fits all solution for treating mental health symptoms. Furthermore, as common mental health disorders are becoming increasingly prevalent and contribute to losses in both health and functioning, it is imperative to explore a range of therapeutic options.Games are becoming increasing popular and people report playing them for a range of reasons, such as to relieve stress and relax. As several studies highlighted, health care practitioners could consider identifying a regimen of prescribed games p to complement existing medication or other treatment options. This is particularly beneficial for those who may wish to engage with additional supports or are waiting to access treatment. This project review suggests that games may have promise for treating anxiety, depression, stress, and low mood.
[1] Brooks FM, Chester KL, Smeeton NC, Spencer NH. Video gaming in adolescence: factors associated with leisure time use. J Youth Stud (2016) 19(1):36–54. doi: 10.1080/13676261.2015.1048200
[2]Depression and Other Common Mental Disorders. (2017, February 23). www.who.int/mental_health/management/depression/prevalence_global_health_estimates/en/ (accessed June 15, 2019).
How does it work ?
Navigate making click over the stars to discover how the conversation should be developed. Depending on the path you take, you might be conducted to a different conversation.
Capture of one of the scenes of Mempathy videogame.Osa major constellation
You might find Stars, Planets and Paths as main elements : Stars will unveil words, planets symbolize silence and paths the way to construct sentences inside the game . Some of the paths draw the well know constellations!
The idea of progress is supported in art by water color progression and in gameplay by discovering a personalized conversation across the different chapters of the video game. The artificial intelligence entity is constructed under the principle of personhood, creating a boundary with the player, offering him/her/them empathy towards mental health exploration issues. It is represented as two eyes during the game.
How I Developed This Project
The project was developed using Unity and Unity ML agents. Agent on inference using Imitation Learning and Reinforcement Learning techniques . The same artificial intelligence agent is able to solve some of the scenes of the video game and is noted by used a different font
Reinforcement Learning
Reinforcement learning is a kind of machine learning method which objective is to learn towards a goal. It works through an interaction in between the Agent -Machine Learning porgram - and an Environment - simulated constellation sky - . It creates a loop in which the agent learns taking actions and clicking in the Stars at two levels, identifying their grammatical structure and choosing a word from a list. This mechanism produces a response coming from the system that responds to the player.
In the Reinforcement Learning Environment, at each time step t, the agent observes the word's grammatical structure (e.g: noun, adjective, verb, adverb) and looks to the word that corresponds to the given structure.
It chooses a word from the database and takes the action of clicking in the star
Software : Unity , Unity ML Agents and Tensorflow
The proposal has been developed with Unity video game engine . Unity provides an open source library that allows developers to train machine learning agents to produce their video games. In the following Capture we can see how the training process is developed.
How I Used Space Agency Data in This Project
For the elaboration of this project, NASA Constellation images archive [1] [2]were selected for making the video game scenes , using them as a background to propose the different stages of the video game .
The use of NASA images database is key to produce the scenes and the word puzzles that the player is going to be unlocking during the game, as it provides the background for the progress of the game. As the methodology used, a NASA database Image was used as a background for placing the Unity Game objects of the game, to later be substituted using a blue water color
Even the final photography is not on the scene, the accurate and rigourous position of NASA Image database has been key and part of the final result of the video game.
Capture of Mempathy videogame using Libra constellation from NASA Image database.
The data used served as the main interaction for the video game design, as the player
Capture of Mempathy videogame using Aries constellation from NASA Image database.
Project Demo
Data & Resources
[1]https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/constellation/news/index.html
[2]https://www.nasa.gov/audience/forstudents/k-4/dictionary/Constellation.html
[3]https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=PIA12066