Aphasia Games for Health
A collaborative effort by the Aphasia Recovery Connection, the University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University, and Thorny Games to fight social isolation and language loss. Building a gaming community for people with aphasia by supporting the development of games for recovery, providing resources for designers, and making aphasia friendly games accessible.
Loss of Language, Not Intellect
Aphasia is a language disorder caused by stroke and other acquired brain injuries characterized by language deficits. It can affect speaking, comprehension, reading, and writing, and has lasting negative effects on quality of life. Aphasia often leads to extreme social isolation.
A Community Based Approach.
Aphasia Games for Health is a collaboration between professional game designers, academic speech pathologists and the aphasia community to develop games that best serve the needs of the aphasia community.
The Organizers
The Aphasia Recovery Connection
The Aphasia Recovery Connection brings a network of over 9,000 global members of people with aphasia, their caregivers and their community into the design process.
University of Pittsburgh
The Language Rehabilitation and Cognition Lab at University of Pittsburgh. Lead by William Evans, LRCL focuses on how “extra-linguistic” factors affect language performance using approaches from pscholinguistics, cognitive psychology, counseling, and technology.
Carnegie Mellon University
The OHLab works at the intersection of culture, learning, play, and design to create brand new interactions and experiences. They focus on games as a tool for learning, empathy, and social empowerment.
Thorny Games
An award-winning design studio for tabletop RPGs and LARPs out of Berkeley, CA. Thorny Games has made strides in integrating language into games in new and playful ways with titles like Dialect: A Game about Language and How it Dies and Sign: A Game about being Understood.
Our Goals
Develop New Games.
Through a partnership between professional game designers, aphasia community members, and speech-language pathology researchers develop games that help restore language, adapt to aphasia, and break through social isolation.
Adapt Existing Games.
To serve as a resource for developers looking to make their games aphasia friendly and to adapt existing games to be more accessible for people with aphasia.
Make Them Available.
To serve as a central hub for games accessible to the aphasia community.
FAQs
Current project status…
We have completed prototypes for three games and published our collaborative co-design process in the Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction.
Our prototypes have been released creative commons to the community for noncommercial use and playtesting (see “Game Prototypes” section above).
We are currently seeking funding to a) complete a pilot study to evaluate their impact on language, communication, and mental health, and b) refine and publish final versions of our games.
How can I get involved?
Download and try out our prototypes and send us feedback to help improve the games (see “Game Prototypes” section above for the games and playtesting instructions).
If you’re a game designer, aphasia community member, or clinician, sign up for our newsletter below. We will send you updates about the project
I’m a game publisher looking to make my games accessible…
We’d love to help! Please use the contact form here to tell us about your game and we’ll be in touch to help evaluate your game for suitability and connect you with community.