Interactive healing videos transcend gaming
Today, the term “healthy videogame” is almost self-contradictory. By far and away the majority of videogames, including console and handheld console games, PC games, online games, and wireless games have some sort of violent action theme or component to them. Since the early 1990s, the number of new ultra-violent games has been steadily on the rise – as have been the concomitant statistics on adolescent violent crime.
The flip side to this grim trend is a movement to improve the mental and physical health and well being of gamers through product use. Leading the vanguard is The Wild Divine Project in Eldorado Springs, Colorado, which produces positive transformational multi-media products as well as different genres of healing music through its recording label, Healing Rhythms. Its flagship product, The Journey to Wild Divine, is a sumptuous interactive videogame and biofeedback program designed to teach people how to reduce stress, deepen relaxation and develop their imaginal and creative abilities.
Last month, the company released a new product,Healing Rhythms, the first whole-body wellness program to bring together three of the most prominent leaders in the field of health and wellness – Deepak Chopra, M.D., Dean Ornish, M.D. and Andrew Weil, M.D. An exquisitely produced and interactive 15-step biofeedback training Program, Healing Rhythms gives individuals the tools to help build a happy mind and a healthy body.
“One of the most important tools you can incorporate into your daily life to affect not only the longevity of your life, but the quality of your life, is a deeper, slower breathing practice,” says - Dr. Andrew Weil. “The exercises in Healing Rhythms do just that.”
While the medical experts guide the meditation and breathing exercises, users can either watch the sumptuous screen imagery that accompanies each exercise, or switch the screen to monitor their bodies’ responses. A biofeedback unit attached to the fingers of one hand measures skin conductance and heart rate variability. The input drives the various biofeedback challenges, such as learning to juggle balls with your laughter, build a stairway with your breath, and meditate to open doors. As proficiency increases, so does the difficulty level of each video challenge. Eventually, as you begin to master your new skills with the game, you become comfortable practicing them in your everyday life.
Headed by founder Kurt Smith and chief design director Corwin Bell, The Wild Divine Project is the result of their mutual vision of creating healing products that are interactive, empowering and accessible to the general public. Their goal is to engender greater self-awareness in individuals in order to support the development of a peaceful, more highly conscious world.
“We’re really here because we believe in our mission of trying to deliver tools to people that can help them transform their lives, and for them to do it themselves,” says Smith, a Ph.D. biomedical engineer. “There is a quantum effect - the more and more people that are actually spending some time discovering themselves and cultivating their own awareness of what reality really is; the more people we have doing that, then there is a meta-network effect in terms of collective consciousness.
 Kurt Smith (right) and Corwin Bell |
The business partnership started when Smith left Medtronics, one of the world’s largest biomedical manufacturers, and started looking for a way to create an in-home, self-care health device. He went rock climbing one day with his new neighbor Bell , who had a masters degree in communication and graphic arts, and years of work in the commercial film and advertising industries. Bell started talking about his dream of developing a computer-based biofeedback device for consumers that would be fun and yet health effective. It was a perfect match. Smith started the corporation and together they set up a design studio deep in the Colorado backcountry. The mission? To create a world that could transport players into deeper self-awareness and a higher realm of consciousness.
”The concept in gaming is called telepresence,” says Bell. “The Holy Grail of gaming is being able to get the person that has a presence outside the computer screen, and all of a sudden, you work it so that the screen itself kind of dissolves into a projection; they teleport their presence into this virtual space. And from then on it’s them…. You are in there, and it is affecting you.”
Although it is common knowledge in the gaming industry that heart rate, blood pressure, respiration, and adrenaline levels increase when a gamer is shooting his or her way out of some fantastic firefight, most companies - much like the tobacco industry - deny their fantasy murder and mayhem products adversely affect juvenile and adult fans over the long term. The vast majority of studies, however, indicate that the net cumulative affect of using violent games is significant – and negative.
“Violent video games are significantly associated with increased aggressive behavior, thoughts, and affect; increased physiological arousal; and decreased pro-social (helping) behavior,” says Craig A. Anderson, a Ph.D. psychologist and member of the Executive Council of the International Society for Research on Aggression. “High levels of violent video game exposure have been linked to delinquency, fighting at school and during free play periods, and violent criminal behavior (e.g., self-reported assault, robbery).”
Unlike mainstream games which trigger adrenaline-based fight or flight physiological and emotional responses, The Journey to Wild Divine’s effects and, of course, those of Healing Rhythms, are uplifting and turned to positive use. As people learn that their emotions and other responses to the exercises affect them, they learn to control and direct their responses via the biofeedback component of the game. They learn to become peaceful, calm, positively energetic and focused. They team with the machine, so to speak, on a journey of conscious growth.
“People’s whole thinking is transformed about what a computer can be as a tool for de-stressing, etc., and having mind blowing experiences,” says Smith.
Vive la difference
Currently, several clinical studies are being done to gauge the effectiveness of using The Journey to Wild Divine in different healing modalities. One acute pain study utilizing the game is being conducted by resident anesthesiologist Paul Lynch at New York University Medical Center.
“It's been shown that biofeedback is really good for chronic … long term pain, fibromyalgia, headaches, things like that,” says Lynch. “The acute research, like someone has surgery and then used biofeedback, there's much less data out there. So we wanted to do a study of the acute area to see if we could take people right after surgery and reduce the amount of pain they feel by having them go through these different exercises and stuff in the Wild Divine Project.”
This is precisely the kind of testing that needs to be done to bring self-healing tools like The Journey to Wild Divine to the attention of mainstream medical institutions, a market Smith wishes would develop more rapidly. Every year he and Bell go to the Games for Health conference which brings together companies in the gaming industry with medical doctors, but results from the conferences so far are lackluster.
“Everybody gets high-minded for a bit and says, ‘Wouldn’t it be great. We should be doing this and that.’ But, you know, we’re really the only product at that conference that people can point to and say, ‘Here’s an example. So, yes we are, in that sense, a role model for those kinds of things.”
“The difficulty is getting the people with that [typical gaming] attitude to try it in the first place,” says Smith. “But yeah, once they do – all of a sudden they discover that there’s something they can do to get an awareness of themselves. If we can kind of help cultivate those things in the users that acquire our product, then we will have done our job.”
For more information about the Wild Divine Project: www.wilddivine.com
