Serious Game Development for the Diagnosis of Major Depressive Disorder Cases Using Machine Learning Methods

Athanasios Tsionas, Aristotelis Lazaridis and Ioannis Vlahavas. “Serious Game Development for the Diagnosis of Major Depressive Disorder Cases Using Machine Learning Methods”. Games and AI - Technological, Cultural and Societal aspects (GAITECUS0), A SETN 2020 Workshop, Athens, Greece, 2-4 September, 2020.

Games and AI - Technological, Cultural and Societal aspects (GAITECUS0), A SETN 2020 Workshop.

serious games, major depression disorder, machine learning, artificial intelligence

Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is a serious mental disorder that affects millions of adults, occasionally leading to life-threatening results. Current diagnostic tools for MDD mostly consist of questionnaires and/or long, specialized therapy sessions. In this work we present a serious game called “The Delivery”, developed for diagnosing MDD in players. The video game has the players immerse into a realistic scenario, the development of which depends on their actions, that is, through conversations with in-game characters, completion of quests, and interactions with the environment. All in-game features and mechanics are designed to correspond to specific diagnostic criteria for MDD. We recorded gameplay data from labeled players (both MDD and non-MDD cases) in order to train Machine Learning models that can accurately distinguish gameplay behaviors MDD-positive and MDD-negative players.