16-year-old student creates LIFTnow in Minecraft as a game for treating insomnia

Varun Thvar wants to educate people about how they can get treatment for insomnia. That isn’t news, but Thvar is a 16-year-old student who has a unique approach to the problem: video games.

Thvar is releasing a game within the popular Minecraft platform that teaches people how to take care of themselves when it comes to dealing with the condition. Thvar calls it LIFTnow, which uses Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-i) techniques to educate people.

He got the idea for it a couple of years ago and sought counsel from the Department of Psychiatry at Stanford University Medical School.

“The thought is to combine existing mental health ideas with video games to create a new very effective and familiar engagenent for treatment,” Thvar said.

Thvar said that the inspiration came to him about his mother became critically ill and he couldn’t sleep for a time. He said his brother and he got through difficult months in part by playing a lot of video games together.

“We spent a lot of time on Minecraft and Pokemon, and I played various mobile games, and we felt a lot better through video games,” he said. “It felt it was more of an escape from reality. And after this, thankfully, my mom got better. After this, I came to a realization that games could be used as a way to improve mental health since they can reach large audiences, especially people without resources for direct treatments like therapy. Games also address stigma on mental health since it’s private and it doesn’t involve going somewhere for therapy.”

So he began researching the idea and became more interested in the notion of mental health. He found that insomnia affects millions of people around the world.

LIFTnow is novel because it leverages the power of gaming, which is known for keeping people engaged with educational subjects. At its core, LIFTnow combines engaging gameplay with CBT-i techniques and sleep education. Thvar chose Minecraft because it is so popular around the world and it’s a sandbox world that lets you create virtually anything.

LIFTnow’s features include a mental health assessment. The game incorporates the Insomnia Severity Index (ISI) questionnaire, a standard tool for measuring the severity of insomnia. This allows players to track their mental well-being as they progress through the game.

Overall, it took a year to make the 3D game inside the Minecraft server.

Each level has some kind of monster, challenge, or final boss to get through. And as you go through that, you can get sleep tips. They address misconceptions about sleep. There is also a sleep cycle inside the game, where the lights get dimmer. If you can abide by the sleep cycle in the game, perhaps you’ll start doing it in real life tool.

As players advance in the game, they receive valuable sleep tips that enhance their understanding of their condition and provide insights into measures they can take to improve their sleep quality. For instance, it tells you not to exercise at night or drink caffeine. Other tips include not drinking alcohol or taking drugs. Clinicians also say you probably shouldn’t eat right before you go to sleep. You should avoid lights, including the light of computers or your smartphone, as blue light emissions can keep you awake.

LIFTnow also simulates a day and night cycle, mirroring the players’ daily routines, contributing to the immersive experience. The game itself has five levels and takes about a half hour to play.

And it has multiplayer functionality where players can participate in the game simultaneously, enabling collaborative gameplay experiences. Players can even engage with their therapists, creating an interactive and supportive approach to insomnia treatment.

Varun Thvar’s journey to creating LIFTnow represents a remarkable fusion of gaming and mental health treatment. The game offers a promising new avenue for individuals struggling with insomnia and seeks to provide an engaging and effective way to address this mental health challenge.

In the wake of the pandemic, Thvar said that the importance of mental health is clear and it was tough for people who were isolated from each other.

“Video games is one of the things that brought my friends and I together,” he said. “We would play Minecraft together and play Rocket League together. And that was the last piece of the puzzle that got me very interested in video games in mental health.”

Thvar said he has played other games that deal with mental health issues, like Celeste, which dealt with anxiety. He loved that game, and he was aware of Akili Interactive’s FDA-approved game treatment for ADHD.

But this was his first crack at making games. He had taken summer courses before on Minecraft development, but he learned most of it on his own. He also had to learn plug-ins to create features such as multiple-choice quizzes.

Thvar chose Minecraft because it was already a no-code platform for video games and it would have been hard to make a full game with other platforms aimed at professional game developers. He learned to use some tools and largely taught himself through online guides. Once he completed the game, all he had to do was share a link to the server to share the game with other people.

“I wanted it to be very effective in terms of mental health treatment, but I also wanted it to feel like a game because the research suggests that video games on their own are very effective,” he said.

He noted that getting people to play Tetris can help them deal with traumatic events.

Thvar wants to roll it out in India, where there are tens of thousands of schools, and he wants to take it into emerging countries where they need it, like refugee camps in Syria. Clearly, high-stress situations can cause insomnia. After rolling it out in some specific places, the nonprofit will roll it out to the broader public.

“That’s the main exciting power about this approach. It can reach people everywhere,” he said.

In addition to creating a game, Thvar created the nonprofit LIFTnow, which will attempt to make other kinds of games that can help people for free. There is no tutorial at the moment, but it’s not hard to play. As part of his work with Stanford, Thvar presented a paper at the American Psychiatric Association’s annual conference this year.

“I hope this is the first of many types of games,” Thvar said. “The original concept for the game was that we would create a mental health game. But we used reusable building blocks in a way so that other people can also build on this game and deal with other mental health conditions.”