Triumf Hero: Between game changer and self-changer
This blog post has been written by our guest writer Andrei-Ioan Bleahu, one of our candidates for the position of Marketing Associate.
Triumf Hero is a story-driven health game. A digital therapeutic tool, the app helps children aged 7 to 14 manage their mental health. Also, the app can be prescribed to manage the stress associated with chronic conditions. As a health game, Triumf Hero represents a disruptive technology-a game changer. What are the advantages of using this approach over more traditional means? Are there any drawbacks? To answer these questions, I will employ three perspectives: a textual perspective, a psychological perspective, and a biosemiotic perspective. My approach aims to pave the way towards an explanatory model of how the game shapes the reader. Let’s start with the textual dimension.
Text is a semiotic notion: a tapestry of signs. Pragmatically, a sign connects expressions (perceptible attributes) with contents (meaningful abstractions). The Italian semiotician and writer Umberto Eco has proposed the theory of the Model Reader. To a certain extent, as Eco puts it, the text „creates the competence of the reader “ (Eco, 2003). Trium Hero can be conceived as text since it contains signs-it is a plane of expressive entities with attached meanings. Now, consider that by acquiring knowledge with the help of the educational modules, the player undergoes a twofold journey: a primary one which is realized in the game space and contains expressions that are familiar to the player and a second one which is the product of the player’s interpretation. The secondary journey requires active effort from the player.
On the one hand, if the player makes positive and constructive interpretations, it will engage more with the game and gain useful knowledge. On the other hand, if the player realizes that the Disease Monster cannot ever be fully defeated but only managed, they might be faced with a choice: to become resilient and find meaning in consistently fighting the disease or choose to quit. Interestingly, for some children (such as cancer patients), “the Disease Monster” can only be managed and not destroyed…
What could determine a child to give up playing this health game? The answer may partially lie in taking a psychology-based framework: maintaining the congruence between one's self-image and the "hero" self-image proposed by Triumf Hero Major threats to self-theories account for mental breakdown and psychosis (Lecky, 1945; Epstein, 1980). Also, people desire to maintain their self-esteem at high levels (Sedikides & Gregg, 2003). Given that self-esteem is a crucial factor that would keep people engaged with the game, the game might consider different difficulty levels to instill a sense of achievement. If children lose self-esteem or become frustrated with some aspect of the game, they might lose motivation at the very beginning and stop playing it before they can fully grasp the game's potential. Changing oneself is a delicate procedure.
Finally, we can consider that Triumf Hero facilitates a dialogue between two entities: player and game. Considering this perspective, change is personal and action-dependent. Given that the game collects data from the child through cleverly integrated psychological questionnaires, and the child acts in the game world to facilitate the collection of data, a cybernetic model of interaction may prove useful in explaining choice-making and self-creation. Such a cybernetic model can be found Jacob von Uexküll’s Umwelt theory. An intuitive way of describing Umwelt is a "bubble of signs" which surrounds a living organism. An Umwelt is a living being's self-world comprising perception and action: to satisfy its needs, it takes actions in the world, and the Umwelt selects and integrates the actions that facilitate the organism's well-being (Uexküll, 1992).
In sum, these perspectives shed new light on the aspects of the game that may need further attention:
The indeterminacy of meaning creation through Umwelt
The creation of a model reader at a textual level
Maintaining the integrity of the self
This analysis conducted here does not solve any problems, its promise being nonetheless valuable: laying down potential directions of improvement. The rest is a hero's journey.
References
Eco U. The role of the reader. Explorations in the Semiotic of Text. Bloomington: Indiana University Press; 2003
Epstein S. The self-concept: a review and the proposal of an integrated theory of personality. In: Staub E, editor. Personality: basic issues and current research. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall; 1980. p. 325–44.
Lecky P. Self-consistency: a theory of personality. New York, NY: Island Press; 1945.
Sedikides, C., & Gregg, A. P. (2003). Portraits of the self. In M. A. Hogg & J. Cooper (Eds.), Sage handbook of social psychology (pp. 110–138). London, England: Sage Publications.
Uexküll, J . A stroll through the world of animals and men: A picture book of invisible worlds. Semiotica 89(4): 319-391; 1992 [1934]
