Video games have been increasingly used as a form of therapy for various mental health conditions. Research has shown that video games can be used to treat conditions such as depression, anxiety, PTSD, and addiction. One of the main benefits of video games in therapy is that they can provide a sense of engagement and immersion that traditional therapy methods may lack. Additionally, video games can teach valuable skills such as problem solving, decision making, and coping strategies. Video games can also simulate real-life scenarios, allowing individuals to practice and improve social skills in a safe and controlled environment. Furthermore, video games can provide feedback and track progress objectively and quantifiably. This paper proposes an approach, the Video Game Therapy^® (VGT^®) approach, where game experience is put at the center of the therapy in a tailored way, connecting the individual patient’s personality, the therapy’s goals, and the suggested type of video game through the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI).VGT^®’s core assumption is that playing video games could facilitate patients in reaching conditions where traditional methodologies and therapeutic approaches could work best. VGT^® was elaborated according to the Adlerian therapy vision and, consequently, the different phases of Adlerian therapy and VGT^® match. Despite the use of video games in psychotherapy might have some adverse effects in specific cases, VGT^® is currently used in three associations with positive results in promoting emotional experimentation and literacy, social feeling, sense of identity, and activating cognitive processes. Future developments include expanding the use of VGT^® further to validate such results from a statistical point of view.

The rise of video games as a mass cultural phenomenon – once confined to a niche hobby for enthusiasts – has triggered a profound shift in their social and scientific perception. Academic research, moving beyond the “moral panic” that for decades limited discussion to topics such as addiction and aggression, has begun to explore their immense potential in innovative fields like psychological well-being and therapy. Within this context, Video Game Therapy® (VGT) emerges as a structured psychotherapeutic approach that, rather than demonizing the video game medium, consciously integrates it into the clinical setting, recognizing its value as a tool for change.

Background/Objectives: Single-case studies represent a sophisticated and rigorous methodological framework, widely established in clinical research for providing high-resolution data on individual functional responses. This study evaluates the clinical utility of integrating immersive Virtual Reality (VR) gaming as a novel “functional ingredient” within the Video Game Therapy (VGT) protocol. Given the exploratory single-case nature of this intervention, clinical state-modulations cannot be rigorously validated using standard aggregated group statistics. Therefore, the core objective of this paper is to investigate the therapeutic potential of the VR session on psychological state-modulation, introducing the Single-Case Normative Analytics (SCNA) framework as the mandatory statistical vehicle required to validate individual longitudinal shifts against normative data. Methods: The study treats individual VR exposures as independent, short-term clinical probes embedded within a real-world clinical journey. The SCNA framework was deployed by integrating Crawford’s modified t-tests with longitudinal percentile tracking against an empirical normative reference group (n = 20). Acute state-anxiety variations (STAI-Y1), psychological well-being (PGWBI), and flow dynamics were tracked across three distinct sessions to monitor the patient’s relative repositioning within the normative distribution. Results: The inferential analysis indicates that the immersive 20-min environment facilitated reliable, statistically significant changes in acute state anxiety and flow dimensions, systematically exceeding standard measurement error boundaries and successfully moving the patient’s psychometric profile toward healthy normative ranges. Conclusions: While these findings focus on individual, idiographic reactivity, they demonstrate the utility of the SCNA framework in providing clinicians with objective, evidence-based feedback on the clinical viability of specific VR-based functional units. This approach allows for a rigorous evaluation of standalone digital tools independently of a full, holistic VGT protocol, offering a structured alternative to traditional designs focused on identifying general patterns across groups.