Dartmouth researchers recruited 532 high school students for one of the largest clinical trials of a video game designed to raise teens’ awareness of mental health issues and substance misuse, according to a report in JAMA Network Open.
The team tracked 269 students who engaged with PlaySmart, a digital behavioral health game developed in the play2PREVENT Lab led by Lynn Fiellin, the study’s senior author and a professor of biomedical data science and medicine at the Geisel School of Medicine.
These students played the game for about an hour after school once a week for up to six weeks. The other 263 students in the trial played commercial role-playing games with no therapeutic content. The researchers followed up with both groups for one year.