Rockstar Games‘ popular western Red Dead Redemption 2 is being used by a center to help elderly people with a various diseases. The Florencia III Day Center in Madrid, Spain specialises in looking after patients with Alzheimer’s, dementia, Parkinson’s and the like. They use various types of therapy including cooking, music, self-care and many more including video games.
In a new report by Spanish newspaper El País, we learn how video games such as Red Dead Redemption 2 are being used by the center. Plus, how this differs from other places using non-traditional games as therapy.
The paper published a video showing the 20 or so patients in the center enjoying Red Dead Redemption 2. In the video released by El País, one of the patients calls protagonist Arthur Morgan Pepe the Cowboy. She goes onto say that he’s handsome but she can also identify a lot with him. Various other members of the group say they enjoy the activity. Red Dead 2 lends itself well to this due to the realism but also the type of content it has on offer and its story.
The Project Details
Note: Quotes have been machine translated from Spanish to English.
This is all part of a program called “Golden Gamers”. Gloria Sánchez who is the director the center and runs the Golden Gamers initiative said “We discovered, in a supernatural way, that interacting with the video game suddenly, very quickly and instantly, enhanced all the goals we had been pursuing for so long. It boosted cognitive, physical, and emotional stimulation. It has a very high gamification component that the serious games or programs we had worked with until then couldn’t achieve.”
Another worker on the Golden Gamers project, Alejandro Morillas, explained that “There’s a lot of papers, a lot of research on games specifically geared toward treating symptoms of dementia. There’s also a lot less evidence based on that about traditional games. There’s much less evidence.”
By using traditional, off the shelf games, such as Red Dead Redemption 2 it goes to show that games like that can be be both enjoyable and useful to anyone. Alejandro continued adding that “It was really nice to see how those reactions, which in principle would be associated with a younger person who is very adapted to the environment, are actually transferred by the very emotion they feel to people who don’t play video games that much. So it’s one more thing that supports the fact that this has no age. This is for everyone.”
You can watch the full report by El País here. Do you know anyone who’s found help within Red Dead Redemption 2? Let us know down in the comments section below.
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