The majority of behavior change and persuasive technologies are exclusively addressed to modify a specific behavior. However, the focus on behavior may cloud the “existential aspects” of the process of change. To explore the lived and meaning-laden experience of behavior change, we interviewed 23 individuals who have used behavior change technology in their everyday life. The study findings highlight that behavior change is tied to meanings that point to existential matters, relates to a nexus of life circumstances, and unfolds over long periods of time. By contrast, the technology used by the participants appears mostly to focus on the present target behavior, ignoring its links to the participants’ life “context” and “time,” also providing scarce help for sense-making. Based on these findings, we surface a preliminary “existential model of behavior change,” identify several barriers that may prevent the modification of behavior and propose some design suggestions to overcome them.

Game-based interventions have been gradually and successfully implemented in the mental health domain given the games’ ability to positively affect a variety of mental health conditions. To this aim, scholars have recently discovered the usefulness of Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) video games, due to their increasing popularity, availability, and cost effectiveness. Nevertheless, key aspects of this line of research have not emerged yet, since a comprehensive overview of how commercial video games impact on different mental disorders is still missing. In this article, we present a systematic literature review of recent research that focuses on the usage of commercial video games in mental health. We analyse 39 papers and map the relevant themes that are recurrent in the last ten years of research, offering a detailed understanding of the methodological approaches that were used, the results obtained, the main disorders addressed, and the video game genres exploited. On the basis of these findings, we highlight open issues in current work and point out a variety of research opportunities that could be tackled in future years, like the need of conducting more field and longitudinal studies, the necessity of developing the design knowledge, and the possibility of connecting research with clinical practice.

The COVID-19 pandemic led to dramatic changes in people’s lives. The Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community widely investigated technology use during crises. However, commercial video games received minor attention. In this article, we describe how video game play impacted the life transformations engendered by the pandemic. We administered a qualitative online survey to 330 video game players who were living in Italy during the lockdown measures. We found that the COVID-19 pandemic altered the participants’ sense of time and space, reshaped both their intimate and wider social interactions, and elicited a wide spectrum of disturbing emotions. Players escaped from this unsatisfying reality into video game worlds, searching for a new normality that could compensate for the unpredictability and dangerousness of the pandemic life, as well as seeking uncertainty in the game environments to balance the flatness of the lockdown everydayness. In doing so, they “appropriated” the gaming technologies, which also led to several unexpected outcomes. Starting from these findings, we propose a model of escapism that points out four ways to escape from reality into video game worlds. Moreover, we outline some design implications that might inspire future strands of research in the field of crisis technologies.