Developed by the University of Auckland, players can choose an avatar which they must guide through seven ‘provinces’ related to problems they may come across while experiencing mental health issues. For instance, the Volcano Province contains tasks which can help teens deal with disruptive emotions, while on another level users have to fight GNATS (Gloomy Negative Automatic Thoughts). Each level takes around 30 minutes to complete and it is recommended that players attempt one or two provinces each week. SPARX, which stands for Smart, Positive, Active, Realistic, X-factor thoughts, has already been tested among 187 young people with varying symptoms of depression, with the results appearing in the British Medical Journal. According to PsychCentral, one group was given typical treatment while the other played the game. Both groups experienced an average reduced anxiety of around one-third and remission rates were actually higher in the group given the game. Gameplay from SPARX is demonstrated in the video below:

Depression can be a difficult subject to broach, especially when it comes to teenagers, but the developers have found a way to integrate therapy into a form already popular with the younger demographic. Medical professionals: could this programme form part of your treatment?

More at: http://www.springwise.com/health_wellbeing/virtual-roleplaying-game-helps-teenagers-deal-depression/

Over the last year, you may have noticed that a once-niche trend not only crept into the mainstream, but is starting to really make a big splash. Gamification has become one of the hottest buzz words in the industry and is probably in the process of taking over a website or user experience near you.

For the uninitiated, gamification, said simply, is the use of game design techniques and mechanics to solve problems and engage audiences. Over the last year, even large companies and enterprises are starting to get in on the game, with Gartner saying that all CIOs should have gamification on their radar, and M2 research predicting that the gamification market will reach 2.8 billion in direct spending by 2016.

Okay, so it’s on the rise, we get that, but let’s take a look at some of the players that are helping to take this trend to the next level. Three companies in particular are currently creating some buzz in the space: Badgeville, Bigdoor and Bunchball.

Badgeville started by making a big splash center stage at Disrupt in the fall of 2009. The company took home the Audience Choice Award at Disrupt, has since gone on a tear and is poised to have a great 2012. (Check out Rip’s original post on Badgeville’s prospects here.)

Badgeville Co-founder and CEO Kris Duggan pulls no punches when it comes to one of the most visible and early adopters of gamification, the check-in king: Foursquare. The CEO says that Foursquare was early in its attempts at gamification, but that its incentivization models remain fundamentally flawed.

Duggan points to the “Mayorship” system within Foursquare: “You have literally hundreds of people and only one mutually-exclusive point of recognition, the Mayor. What happens to the other hundreds of people? Not only are they not engaged, but you don’t take into consideration different types of users.” Duggan believes you need to engage not only the heavy user, but medium and light users as well. Rather than a one-size-fits-all methodology, you can appeal to each user type and incent them accordingly.

More at: http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/12/no-longer-an-awkward-teenager-gamification-grows-up/

Gaming firm Electronic Arts (EA) has partnered with pop singer Katy Perry to develop and promote multiple games within its ‘The Sims’ franchise, featuring Perry-themed in-game content and virtual goods.

Katy Perry: stars in latest marketing activity for The Sims franchise

The partnership will feature Perry in all-new marketing activity for the brand, which will begin with a campaign supporting the launch of a collector’s editor for ‘The Sims 3 Showtime’.

EA is releasing the game on 9 March in the UK and will publicise it with a television campaign starring Perry.

More at: http://www.marketingmagazine.co.uk/news/rss/1112717/EA-gets-together-Katy-Perry-boost-Sims

Watch out, Facebook. Google is making its own game for Google+ … and it involves maps.

Yesterday, the company released a video of the new game, which takes advantage of its Google Maps product. The video shows a cube with a map overlay. A small blue ball travels through the map based on the spinning and tilting of the cube. Judging by the video, it seems players will have to move through the map, hitting certain destinations to collect points along the way. When a destination is hit, a small piece of information about the place pops up, then you can go on to your next.

Google introduced games to its social network Google+ in August. Facebook, Google+’s major competitor, integrated gaming applications onto its platform long ago and has made a very successful business of it. In fact, Zynga, now a social gaming powerhouse with titles like Castleville and Farmville, recently debuted as a public company on the Nasdaq. Google+ didn’t wait the shadows for too long, however, and quickly attracted big gaming companies such as PopCap and Zynga to its own social network.

More at: http://venturebeat.com/2012/01/11/google-plus-maps-game/?obref=obinsite

Having never made a game before, design studio Ustwo spent £150,000 making a 69p app called Whale Trail. What were they thinking?

When London-based design studio Ustwo set out to make iOS game Whale Trail, it took a big risk.
How big? The game’s budget hit £150,000.

And the gamble didn’t stop with a daring financial plan for a title that would, like so many other drops in the App Store ocean, retail for 69p. Ustwo, which typically works on branded apps and user experiences for high profile clients like Sony and Intel, devoted an astonishing 4,500 man-hours and a sizeable chunk of its studio headcount to developing Whale Trail, in spite of the fact that it isn’t a game developer by trade.

What’s more, at least 300,000 sales will be needed for the game to edge into profitability; no easy feat in the unpredictable App Store. At time of writing, it is well on the way, having been festooned with positive feedback, but Whale Trail is not guaranteed success to the point that it will return on its investment.

In fact, the cheerful side-scroller is the third production from an internal collective of ten Ustwo staff that go under the enigmatic name of CWA. Established and led by the Ustwo co-founder primarily known as Mills, CWA was granted £650,000 to make three titles over a year, with Whale Trail serving as the final, most high profile project.

“CWA stands for ‘Content With Attitude’. I mean, that’s just so bad,” admits Mills, real name Matt Miller, who is the kind of character who could easily mean  ‘good’ when he says ‘bad’.

More at: http://www.develop-online.net/features/1492/Whale-Trail-The-Inside-Story