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.
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 overall 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
“It’s really about self responsibility. How can I, individually, make a difference? And the more people we get off the street corners carrying their flags and yelling [for their causes], and into their meditation studios, the more effect it will have.”
The partnership started off as a perfect example of universal entanglement – better known as coincidence. Smith had left Medtronics, one of the world’s largest biomedical manufacturers, and was looking for a way to create some sort of in-home, self-care health device. He went rock climbing one day with a new neighbor – Bell – who started talking about his dream of developing a computer-based biofeedback device for consumers that would be fun and yet health effective. This, of course, precisely fit the model of what Smith was looking for. He set up the corporation and told Bell to go for it.
With a masters degree in communication and graphic arts and years of work in the commercial film and advertising industries, Bell had considerable skills and talent. He put together a creative team that eventually moved their work into “The Studio” deep in the Colorado backcountry. There, Bell, his graphic artists and modeler were able to focus on the expanding vision of The Journey to Wild Divine; often going into meditation to experientially gauge the consciousness levels of the graphics and the interactive exercises they were creating. The goal? To create from a non-egoic space, 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.”
Here lies the vast philosophic difference between regular videogame producers like Sony, Sega, Nintendo and Atari and companies like The Wild Divine Project. Although it is common knowledge 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.
“When one combines all relevant empirical studies using meta-analytic techniques, five separate effects emerge with considerable consistency,” says Craig A. Anderson a Ph.D. psychologist and member of the Executive Council of the International Society for Research on Aggression. “Violent video games are significantly associated with increased aggressive behavior, thoughts, and affect; increased physiological arousal; and decreased prosocial (helping) behavior. 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 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.
“All of a sudden, as you experience the computer and are doing something, it’s like, ‘How did it know that?’ Like, ‘That’s me in there,’ you know? And I think that that is really a profound way to actually move people’s consciousness and feeling states,” Bell says. “All of a sudden you can levitate something. And it’s like, ‘Wow. Wow. I was there. How do I feel?”
Both The Journey to Wild Divine and the company’s newest product, a beautiful, advanced biofeedback sequel called Wisdom Quest, are designed with a particular developmental “take away” for the gamer in mind. The Journey to Wild Divine’s takeaway is compassion. The takeaway in Wisdom Quest is wisdom.
“In a sense, the journey is up through the heart chakra in the passage, and then to the crown chakra in Wisdom Quest,” says Smith. “ … [people’s] whole thinking is transformed about … what a computer can be as a tool for de-stressing, etc., and having mind blowing experiences. … And when people get that first hit from this - there’s always kind of chemical experience they have in the brain that’s pleasing.”
Bell agrees. “It actually starts to crank the chemistry in the neuro-networks [with thoughts] that say, ‘I could be a compassionate person, or I am a compassionate person.’”
Vive la difference In addition to the overall uplifting effects, there are additional uses for the two games. Currently there are several clinical studies 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.”
Lynch’s study is comprised of 60 women divided into two groups. Each woman has had the same lower abdominal surgery for a hysterectomy. They are given precisely the same kind of opioid delivery equipment to self-regulate their pain. The only difference between the two groups of patients is that one group is given a laptop with The Journey to Wild Divine on it, instructed and encouraged to play for at least two hours within the first 16 hours after surgery. The other group has no access to the game. Lynch is testing to see if playing the game helps acute sufferers lessen their pain. If so, the amount of self-administered opioid should be less in the game-playing group than the control group.
No results have been released yet from the study, which will be complete in three or four months
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.”
But neither Smith nor Bell are resting on their laurels – they’re too focused on expanding their work. Wisdom Quest, for example, is an extension of the original game, both in terms of a journey that people get to take and the technology. In Wisdom Quest, which was developed with a number of great collaborators such as Deepak Chopra and Dean Ornish, the biofeedback activities are much more advanced. It requires doing complex events where you’re looking at both heart rate and the energy level of the body. It is also prompting people to go a little deeper into their own self-awareness.
On the drawing boards is a project both Smith and Bell allude to, but refuse to talk about yet – except for the fact that it is designed to be more appealing to the broader gaming market – meeting the public where it’s at, so to speak.
“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 – for example, we did these user tests last summer, where, you know, we just take people off the street … and set them down and some of them were ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah!’ … All of a sudden they discover that there’s something they can do to get an awareness of themselves. And that’s really the key - to help people understand that they can be more aware of what’s going on inside of them. … And a lot of it has to do with [developing] sheer loving kindness to ourselves and others, and compassion. And if we can kind of help cultivate those things in the users that acquire our product, then we will have done our job.”
*From the Psychological Science Agenda, Volume 16: No. 5, October 2003
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