Nevermind is a horror adventure game that uses your own level of fear to set the difficulty.
The player is a neuroprober tasked with investigating the subconscious minds of trauma victims, solving puzzles and exploring labyrinths. As you play, changes in your heart rate will indicate how stressed or afraid you are and the game will adjust the difficulty accordingly. The higher your heart rate the harder Nevermind becomes. "The game knows when you get scared and when you get stressed," says creator Erin Reynolds. "You need to learn how to calm down in order to make the game easier."
It's billed as a horror game but the way biofeedback corresponds with difficulty means that Nevermind could also function as a tool for practicing stress and anxiety management techniques.
A horror genre take on apps like Flowy, perhaps. "Nevermind has a lot of potential to actually help people through mindfulness techniques to manage their own stress and anxiety, says USC Creative Media & Behavioral Health Centre Director Marientina Gotsis. "I've been yearning for years for something like this to be put out in public. This is in tune with what we know in affective neuroscience, in terms of how the brain works, and is a very exciting experiment to combine both games and potential health benefits."
Nevermind is currently designed to work with a Garmin heart monitor strap but the goal is to support as many biofeedback sensors as possible with a focus on those which players might already have in their homes -- reliance on players buying or owning the right peripherals is going to be one of the biggest challenges for biofeedback gaming and virtual reality gaming.
The project began life as a thesis project led by Reynolds as part of the University of Southern California's Interactive Media Program and was an official selection at 2012's IndieCade festival.
Now she is aiming to make it her full-time job and has set up a Kickstarter seeking $250,000 (£153,000) in funding.
If successful, Nevermind has an expected release date of June 2015.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
