Happiness at play

McGill psych prof turns his academic
research into an award-winning game

FUN WITH THE THOUGHT PROCESS:
MindHabits CEO Matthew Mather

by ERIK LEIJON

McGill University’s department of psychology might be an unlikely creator of an award-winning video game, yet lo and behold, MindHabits has successfully taken social intelligence research from the pages of the journal of the American Psychological Association (APA) to the video game realm. Based on the work of McGill psychology professor Dr. Mark Baldwin, MindHabits is designed to reduce stress and improve self-confidence, all with a few clicks of a computer mouse.

For a decade, Dr. Baldwin has been studying how reinforcing people with positive words and imagery could actually boost self-esteem by wiring the human brain to instinctively associate smiling faces with words like “love” and “caring.” He eventually created his own prototype games, never expecting them to leave the laboratory.

“Dr. Baldwin had the observation one day while playing Tetris,” says MindHabits CEO Matthew Mather. “Once you finish playing, your brain will still think about fitting pieces together. He discovered there was a lot of automatic thought processes going on inside people’s brains, and some of the things he was working on could be used in a video game as a method for adopting better mind habits.”

COMPUTING SOCIAL INTELLIGENCE: MindHabits

The original MindHabits game—consisting of four mini-games—was released in 2007 as a pay online download on casual gaming Web sites worldwide. The game will be hitting retail on Sept. 1 via American publisher Got Game Entertainment for PC and Mac computers; Nintendo DS and cell phone portable versions with nine mini-games will be released in early 2009. The DS version is being developed by Charlottetown-based Other Ocean Interactive.

The four mini-games in MindHabits are simple exercises intended to be played for five minutes each day or immediately before an important social occasion. One game, entitled Matrix, requires the player to click on the one smiling face among a lineup of frowning faces. Over 1,500 faces were photographed for the game, and by picking out smiling faces in rapid succession, the idea is the human brain will instinctively pick out positive situations in the real world once the game is over.

For the Oct. 2007 APA research study, Dr. Baldwin tested the effects of playing Matrix on telemarketers. “Because who deals with rejection more than telemarketers?” says Mather. “We got them to play for five minutes a day before work, and used cotton swabs to test their stress hormone, cortisol. The control group played a similar game but without smiley faces. We noticed a 17 per cent reduction in stress hormones and increased productivity at work.”

With the success of health-oriented casual games such as Nintendo’s Brain Age and WiiFit, the potential for Dr. Baldwin’s simple brain exercises to penetrate the still nascent casual gaming industry is there. Accolades came in the form of Telefilm Canada’s first and only Great Canadian Video Game Competition in 2007, where it won the top prize. The award-winning version consisted of the same games created by Baldwin, although Montreal developer Article 19 made them commercially presentable.

Baldwin’s transition from the lab to the gaming industry is unique in a field where research tends to stay within university walls, although it could encourage more universities as a means of acquiring future project funding. Mather says they’re also proud that his research has been able to reach far more people than Baldwin had ever imagined.

“It may be anecdotal,” says Mather, “but in playing the word association game, I get the words like ‘love’ stuck in my head, like a show tune. I think there’s a positive effect in that.”