Game tracks cancer patients’ mood

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This article was published 11/05/2011 (5273 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

ROBERTA Woodgate is just your typical hardcore video gamer — except she’s a nursing professor who’s designed a virtual world to help children and adolescents suffering from cancer.

The University of Manitoba professor and researcher marked National Nursing Week Tuesday by formally presenting her research on children’s cancer that she hopes will help kids better communicate their feelings about the disease.

“An overwhelming sense of disbelief may occur” when kids are diagnosed, Woodgate explained. Children she interviewed felt awkward and clumsy, they were in pain, they couldn’t do things for themselves: “They were not really experiencing life.”

Woodgate has developed a new video game called EMÜD (pronounced E-mood) to help children tell health-care professionals indirectly how they’re feeling and what may be helping to improve their feelings.

The computer game incorporates something Woodgate learned in her research when she asked kids to both say and draw how they were feeling and enter it in a hand-held computer diary — they really liked depicting their feelings through drawings.

Young cancer patients helped Woodgate design EMÜD.

“There should be a storyline to it. They wanted a pet within the game, and they wanted co-operation” among players to help achieve goals, Woodgate said.

Children indicate how they’re feeling at the start and then the game asks them several more times throughout play so that Woodgate can track changes in mood and see what may have led to the change.

EMÜD is set in Terra, a once-glorious world lush with green and full of life. Without warning, “A dark force cast its shadow across the land,” she said.

Each of seven fantastical lands has a shrine to the qualities of a good life, but valour became fear and insecurity, health became sickness, calmness and gentleness gave way to annoyance and anger.

Players design their own avatars, then journey through the seven lands, crossing bridges, navigating mazes, facing challenge upon challenge, though with the help of various animals of their choice and other players.

They also enter the Cave of Songs to choose their own music.

Players can regain the qualities of a good life and fight the shadows, though the game is not easy.

In the game as in life, “Children must learn to have hope…to learn to persevere against the pain and anguish,” Woodgate said.

nick.martin@freepress.mb.ca