Mental Health in the Classroom
If you’ve recognized that I haven’t left many posts as of late, it’s because the day job has had me pretty busy. I’m here now for some shameless promotion for the new release I’ve been working on at Kognito: At Risk.
At Risk is a game wrapped around a conversation simulation where you’re a professor at a college and you have to watch out for students who are showing signs of mental distress. If you have suspicions that there are students ‘at-risk’, you have to invite them to office hours and have a conversation with them, and if it turns out the student is truly ‘at-risk’, then you need to convince the kid to seek counseling (sort of an intervention). Feel free to play the demo and leave some feedback.
Keep in mind that the underlying motivation behind At Risk is to train faculty to recognize, approach, and refer mentally distressed students who might otherwise fall by the wayside. We made this game in partnership with the Mental Health Association of New York. Here’s the link (click on the button near the top of the screen to play the demo):
PS: Please pass on to friends if you think they might be interested, any publicity helps!
Man, that is quite the opening cut-scene.
There’s something compelling about the look, like a how-to manual come to life.
Yeah, it’s interesting as an adventure-game that seems to know what all adventure-games are– interactive pop-up books. I’m fond of the genre myself, even if I’m not a big fan of menu-driven interfaces like this, but they’re the standard, and they work in this sort of context, where the emphasis is less on gameplay and more on instructional interactivity.
My main problem, though– the choices I’m making determine what the professor says, yet the game goes to great lenghts to dissasociate me from him, saying that I’m there to “help” him with the conversations. If my actions make me feel like I’m playing his role, why does he have to address the player directly?