Evergreen: An existential video game to increase the indices associated with existential thinking in the audience

Abstract

Humans are thinking beings. Pondering about the purpose of life has always been one of their concerns historically. In this study, an adventure game called Evergreen was created, enabling players to engage in dialogue-based interactions centered around existential issues, with a specific focus on the crisis of meaning. The game draws inspiration from Yalom's existential psychotherapy and seeks to convey profound human concerns through an interactive digital medium. We interviewed experts in psychology and computer games to assess and refine the game. Subsequently, we assessed the levels of meaning in life and the existential thinking among players before and after playing the refined version of the game. The results revealed a positive association between the game and the meaning in life scores of the players [Control group (50.63 ± 5.18) and Test group (54.60 ± 8.12), (P = 0.028)]. However, there was no significant relationship between the implementation of the existential game created in the present study and the shifts in the scores on the Scale for Existential Thinking of the intervention group [Control group (33.98 ± 5.07) and Test group (34.20 ± 4.74), (P = 0.865)].