The Benefits of the Placebo Effect in Serious Games : Possible Applications to Game Design

Sammanfattning: The presence of the placebo effect can be traced down both in the medical field and games. In the medical field, the placebo effect has been used to understand the effectiveness of any treatment or a specific drug given in a control group. If the medicine is working or it’s just the perceived improvement, which is the placebo effect. The placebo effect in games and its use is a recent discovery, proven by Denisova A., Cairns P. (2015). It is a beneficial effect that occurs to a person due to the person's belief that they'll receive a benefit. The mechanism of the placebo effect is not well understood both in the medical field and games. However, we are curious to understand the potential factors that may provoke any placebo response in games and define it in the game contexts, intending to implement such factors in future game design decisions for enhancing the player experience. Placebo response is about influencing individuals' mindset to believe in a perceived improvement from an experience. Under a therapeutic condition, such effects can also help people to get relief from depression, anxiety, and other mental health issues. We are looking into the feasible factors that may become the potential to provoke a placebo response in any game. Regarding the potential factors, we are referring to priming and conditioning in game design contexts. Priming and conditioning are widely used theories in games that may enhance players' self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is the belief in one’s ability to perform a specific task and is influenced by previous mastery experiences, vicarious experiences, social persuasions, and emotional states (Bandura, 1997, as cited in Wery 2013). Understanding improvement in players' self-efficacy will probably lead us in addressing the definition of the placebo effect in games. Self-efficacy and placebo response both happen to have a correlation, which has been noticed throughout this research. In this research, we have also tried to understand the use of the placebo response to harness players' self-efficacy enhancement through the gameplay experience. To enhance the players' gameplay experience, we have analyzed different aspects to achieve a positive outcome through the placebo effect. This report provides an insight into qualitative research on a case study. To test the hypothesis the case study has been carried out on the brain training app NeuroNation. The outcome of the process indicates the presence of priming and conditioning in games like NeuroNation. Despite having the research limitations, certain outcomes seem to become potential indicators in provoking effects like placebo, which can become possible to prove in the future within long-term research scope.