Video Game Therapy

The Sunday Times, 26 March 2006

Video game therapy is becoming more widely used around the world today. I support the use of video game therapy as a form of treatment to some patients as i think it is a creative, unique yet effective way of treatment. A boy who was pronounced brain dead awoke after a month long coma, doctors said that he will never be the same again and will never walk nor talk. Yet today the boy has caught up with his peers in school and even made a speech in front of the whole school, and he owes his speedy progress of recovery to a neuro-feedback training on the Cyber-Learning Technolgy LLC system, which is a form of video game therapy. These video game therapies are quite effective, especially to children because the incorporation of video games taps young people's fascination with animation and electronics to sweeten often long, frightening and painful medical treatments. The video games help to make the patient enjoy the medical treatments and hence lead to the improvement of these treatments. Therefore i believe that such video game therapy is effective and Singapore should also start incorporating such therapies to their medical treatments too. In some countries, schools use the game Dance Dance Revolution, which involves the participant to move about to perform dance steps, to help curb the problem of obesity among students. I feel that this is really a great idea as students not only play, but are in someway exercising and losing weight at the same time. With this method of fighting obesity, more students will be interested and determined to lose weight as it involves a fun process unlike the traditional tiresome ritual of working out till they drop at the gym. Thus i feel that video game therapy is a great new way of treatment and will definitely become more popular in the future.