How to Play Games without Losing Your Cool

Posted on Oct 26 2012 - 9:07pm by Thomas Sharp

If you have a child who gets red faced and furious as they throw birds around on their mobile phone or steal cars on screen then you might be interested in the latest piece of research in the world of gaming. It is designed to help young players enjoy playing games without losing their cool.

This has come out as a result of work done by researches based at Boston Children’s Hospital and is designed to help youngsters control their emotions while they are playing games.

Those Old Alien Spaceships Again

The player uses a device which monitors their heart rate as they play. The game they used to try out the system was an exciting sounding one which involved the timeless task of getting stuck into alien spaceships. The only problem is when the monitor went above the preset limit the player lost the ability to shoot until they got themselves back under control again.

The system is called RAGE (Regulate and Gain Emotional) Control. It was tried out with 18 young players and they each had 5 sessions of 15 minutes at the game. It turned out that these players had better control of their emotions than other players who had just played the game without their heart rate being monitored.

If the current trials carry on going well then it looks like we can expect arrange of RAGE Control games and toys coming out in the future. You can find full details of the experiment in the Journal of Adolescent Psychiatry, which we believe has a few other interesting articles in it as well.

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