Biofeedback-based horror game challenges players to deal with fear

While traditional horror video games seek to provide an exciting thrill, Nevermind is a biofeedback-enhanced horror game that has greater ambitions. It requires you to manage your anxiety in alarming scenarios – the more stressed you feel, the harder the game becomes. The aim, says Erin Reynolds, its creator, is for players to learn how to not let their fears get the best of them in nerve-wracking situations and hopefully carry over their gameplay-acquired skills into the real world.

A Garmin cardio chest strap akin to the ones gym-goers use to monitor their workout acts as a sensor, relaying the player’s heart rate information to the game through an ANT+ USB stick. The game calculates the player’s Heart Rate Variability (HRV), measuring the change in the duration between their heartbeats to figure out when their “fight or flight” response has kicked in and adjusts the gameplay accordingly. While Nevermind can’t zero in on specific stressful emotions like frustration or upset, it’s able to detect the intensity of the player’s feelings and gauge how deeply they feel stress at any point during the game.

Instead of having fanged horrors and hordes of zombies jump out from around corners, which might need a learning curve, the game is more subtle in inducing fear and is designed to appeal to non-gamers too. It creates a warped chaotic atmosphere where the creepiness factor is slowly dialed up, with huge screaming heads, blood-spattered doors and thrashing body bags.

Assuming the role of a newly hired Neruroprober at the Neurostalgia Institute, players boldly dive into the troubled minds of traumatized patients who are repressing their most horrific memories. To root out the cause of their suffering, players will need to solve puzzles and be willing to face a host of unimaginable terrors before the patient’s subconscious is ready to release its painful memories.

"This psychological phenomenon is based on how some people cope with severe psychological trauma in real life," Reynolds tells Gizmag. "These are individuals who experienced an event so terrible at some point in their lives that their conscious minds locked all memories of that event away completely. Although the patients can’t recall exactly what, if anything, happened to them, the repressed memories end up festering within their subconscious and create immense challenges in their attempts to live a normal life."

The sensor detects how scared or stressed the player gets as they move through the patient’s subconscious, recovering ten Polaroid photographs that each represent a distressful memory. Once all the photographs have been collected, they’ll have to differentiate the false memories from the five true ones and reconstruct the traumatizing memory. If they start to feel more fear, which the game sets out to trigger, the gameplay becomes perceptibly difficult. While some situations impact players more than others, they are all designed to push the player’s buttons.

For example, in the “car maze” section players follow the guiding sound of a blaring car horn through a twisting cave-like maze of crashed and wrecked cars full of disorienting imagery. As the player’s fear levels rise, the visuals become increasingly distorted until they are barely able to see what’s ahead of them.

"Some players become anxious over the car horn, others over the complexity of the maze, some over the imagery – there are a whole host things in this area that can rile up one’s nerves," says Reynolds. "The player needs to have a good grasp on how to calm down by this point in the game as it’s a nearly impossible challenge to escape the maze while scared or stressed."

In another scenario, the player explores a grotesque kitchen to find an ambiguous writhing mass in an oven and a giant bloodied refrigerator buzzing with flies that offers a puzzle. If the player gets rattled trying to solve the puzzle in this disturbing setting, milk starts flooding the room, pouring in from all over. Sloshing around in the waist-high milk makes it harder to move and the more anxious the player feels, the more milk floods in until it drowns them. If they are able to calm down in time the milk stops pouring in and drains out. If not, they drown and the game pulls them out of the room, returning them to the peaceful surroundings of the Institute until they feel ready again.

Making the game tougher as the player’s fear increases might seem counter-intuitive, but its developers were very clear about designing it that way. “We wanted players to become aware in a very real way of when their anxiety levels were starting to become elevated and reward them for being able to manage that anxiety on the fly,” Reynolds tells us. “We knew making the environment change so significantly that it would impact what the player was doing would get their attention.”

Developed as part of a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) thesis project within the University of Southern California’s Interactive Media and Games Division, Nevermind took about a year to build and presently exists as a “proof of concept game.” It has one level with one patient’s subconscious mind connected to a hub area that’s built to support the minds of 10 more patients. A play through takes about an hour. Reynolds plans to get a Kickstarter project going and launch the game with a variety of disturbed patients in late 2014. The team also plans to conduct thorough studies of the game’s impact on players and explore its use in therapy.

Will playing the game have us reacting to freaky situations with a Yoda-like serene gaze? Its developers hope it will help.

“Nevermind draws players in with the promise of a fun, exciting horror game that uses some spiffy new technology, but I hope it ultimately leaves them better equipped to take on the world more bravely and confidently than ever before,” Reynolds tells us. “In a way, it’s the biggest puzzle in the game – how do you solve your gut, knee-jerk reactions to unpleasant scenarios? If you can figure it out in the game, you’ll find success. If you can figure it out in life, you’ll find success there too.”

Stanford scientists build a ‘brain stethoscope’ to turn seizures into music

When Chris Chafe and Josef Parvizi began transforming recordings of brain activity into music, they did so with artistic aspirations. The professors soon realized, though, that the work could lead to a powerful biofeedback tool for identifying brain patterns associated with seizures.

Josef Parvizi was enjoying a performance by the Kronos Quartet when the idea struck. The musical troupe was midway through a piece in which the melodies were based on radio signals from outer space, and Parvizi, a neurologist at Stanford Medical Center, began wondering what the brain’s electrical activity might sound like set to music.

He didn’t have to look far for help. Chris Chafe, a professor of music research at Stanford, is one of the world’s foremost experts in “musification,” the process of converting natural signals into music. One of his previous works involved measuring the changing carbon dioxide levels near ripening tomatoes and converting those changing levels into electronic performances.

Parvizi, an associate professor, specializes in treating patients suffering from intractable seizures. To locate the source of a seizure, he places electrodes in patients’ brains to create electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings of both normal brain activity and a seizure state.

He shared a consenting patient’s EEG data with Chafe, who began setting the electrical spikes of the rapidly firing neurons to music. Chafe used a tone close to a human’s voice, in hopes of giving the listener an empathetic and intuitive understanding of the neural activity.

Upon a first listen, the duo realized they had done more than create an interesting piece of music. [Listen to the audio here]

"My initial interest was an artistic one at heart, but, surprisingly, we could instantly differentiate seizure activity from non-seizure states with just our ears," Chafe said. "It was like turning a radio dial from a static-filled station to a clear one."

If they could achieve the same result with real-time brain activity data, they might be able to develop a tool to allow caregivers for people with epilepsy to quickly listen to the patient’s brain waves to hear whether an undetected seizure might be occurring.

Parvizi and Chafe dubbed the device a “brain stethoscope.”

The sound of a seizure

The EEGs Parvizi conducts register brain activity from more than 100 electrodes placed inside the brain; Chafe selects certain electrode/neuron pairings and allows them to modulate notes sung by a female singer. As the electrode captures increased activity, it changes the pitch and inflection of the singer’s voice.

Before the seizure begins – during the so-called pre-ictal stage – the peeps and pops from each “singer” almost synchronize and fall into a clear rhythm, as if they’re following a conductor, Chafe said.

In the moments leading up to the seizure event, though, each of the singers begins to improvise. The notes become progressively louder and more scattered, as the full seizure event occurs (the ictal state). The way Chafe has orchestrated his singers, one can hear the electrical storm originate on one side of the brain and eventually cross over into the other hemisphere, creating a sort of sing-off between the two sides of the brain.

After about 30 seconds of full-on chaos, the singers begin to calm, trailing off into their post-ictal rhythm. Occasionally, one or two will pipe up erratically, but on the whole, the choir sounds extremely fatigued.

It’s the perfect representation of the three phases of a seizure event, Parvizi said.

Part art exhibit, part experiment

Caring for a person with seizures can be very difficult, as not all seizure activity manifests itself with behavioral cues. It’s often impossible to know whether a person with epilepsy is acting confused because they are having a seizure, or if they are experiencing the type of confusion that is a marker of the post-ictal seizure phase.

To that end, Parvizi and Chafe hope to apply their work to develop a device that listens for the telltale brain patterns of an ongoing seizure or a post-ictal fatigued brain state.

"Someone – perhaps a mother caring for a child – who hasn’t received training in interpreting visual EEGs can hear the seizure rhythms and easily appreciate that there is a pathological brain phenomenon taking place," Parvizi said.

The device can also offer biofeedback to non-epileptic patients who want to hear the music their own brain waves create.

The effort to build this device is funded by Stanford’s Bio-X Interdisciplinary Initiatives Program (Bio-X IIP), which provides money for  interdisciplinary projects that have potential to improve human health in innovative ways. Bio-X seed grants have funded 141 research collaborations connecting hundreds of faculty since 2000. The proof-of-concept projects have produced hundreds of publications, dozens of patents, and more than a tenfold return on research funds to Stanford.

From a clinical perspective, the work is still very experimental.

"We’ve really just stuck our finger in there," Chafe said. "We know that the music is fascinating and that we can hear important dynamics, but there are still wonderful revelations to be made."

Next year, Chafe and Parvizi plan to unveil a version of the system at Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center. Visitors will don a headset that will transmit an EEG of their brain activity to their handheld device, which will convert it into music in real time.

"This is what I like about Stanford," Parvizi said. "It nurtures collaboration between fields that are seemingly light-years apart  – we’re neurology and music professors! – and our work together will hopefully make a positive impact on the world we live in."

Biofeedback-augmented video game helps children curb their anger

Often, when people talk about children and the psychological effects of playing video games, it’s nothing good – there are certainly plenty of individuals who maintain that if a child spends too much time blowing away virtual enemies, they will become more aggressive, antisocial people in the real world. A new game developed at Boston Children’s Hospital, however, is intended to do just the opposite. It helps children with anger problems to control their temper, so they’ll get along better with other people.

The game, appropriately called RAGE Control, requires the young player to shoot at enemy spaceships while sparing friendly ones. The child’s heart rate is monitored and displayed on the screen, via a sensor attached to one of their fingers. As long as they keep calm and their heart rate stays below a certain threshold, they can keep blasting at the spaceships. If they lose control and their heart rate goes too high, however, they lose the ability to shoot – the only way to regain that ability is to calm back down and lower their heart rate.

“The connections between the brain’s executive control centers and emotional centers are weak in people with severe anger problems,” said Dr. Joseph Gonzalez-Heydrich, co-creator of the game and senior investigator on the study. “However, to succeed at RAGE Control, players have to learn to use these centers at the same time to score points.”