Multimedia Field Test: Evaluating the Creative Ambitions of SuperBetter and Its Quest to Gamify Mental Health
Article
Chou, T, Bry, LJ, Comer, JS. (2017). Multimedia Field Test: Evaluating the Creative Ambitions of SuperBetter and Its Quest to Gamify Mental Health
. COGNITIVE AND BEHAVIORAL PRACTICE, 24(1), 115-120. 10.1016/j.cbpra.2016.10.002
Chou, T, Bry, LJ, Comer, JS. (2017). Multimedia Field Test: Evaluating the Creative Ambitions of SuperBetter and Its Quest to Gamify Mental Health
. COGNITIVE AND BEHAVIORAL PRACTICE, 24(1), 115-120. 10.1016/j.cbpra.2016.10.002
SuperBetter is a family of interfaces including a browser-based game, an online forum, and a companion mobile application that collectively seek to “gamify” resilience, wellness, motivation, and mental health. Players register and use “gamified” components and content to address mental and physical health challenges and to pursue identified goals. The primary strength of the SuperBetter ecosystem is its innovative approach, drawing on gaming metaphors and the use of evidence-based strategies in both its design and provided content. Efforts in creating an engaging, playable system incentivizing users’ incremental steps towards larger goals are constrained by SuperBetter's relative lack of structure and direction, limits to meaningful progress monitoring, its largely static content regardless of varied user goals, and broad concerns regarding the utility of the overall system. The program presents a potential model for the application of gaming techniques and design to the dissemination of clinically effective concepts to a larger consumer market, but presently lacks sufficient empirical support for claims of evidence-based effectiveness.
