At KOZEE, Psychology is at the forefront of the platform. Considering the fact that we aren’t PhDs or PsyDs ourselves, we love to outreach and call in the cavalry of highly qualified professionals at our side.
Recently, we have added a new member to our ever-growing team: Meet Nick Bowman! Dr. Bowman is an associate professor of communications at Syracuse University in New York and is an expert in media psychology. (People who study media psychology specifically look at how emerging media such as video games affects those that use it.)
Not only that, Dr. Bowman has ongoing partnerships with the Universidad Panamericana Guadalajara in Mexico, National Chengchi University (國立政治大學) in Taiwan and The Games Institute at the University of Waterloo in Canada. If you’d like to read up on his published material (and there’s a lot of it, with more than 150 peer-reviewed publications cited more than 10,000 times), I would suggest “The effect of in-game moral choices and NPCs’ identities on players’ intergroup attitudes”. This is his most recent publication and was an incredibly interesting read. I think as gamers, especially of the cozy variety, we tend to start caring about our actions and interactions with NPCs within the games we play. Everything within this article was intriguing through and through, so if you’re looking for some reading to nourish the brain after an intense gaming session, I can’t recommend this more. And if that isn’t enough, definitely take a look at his mood management papers, specifically: “‘In the Mood to Game’: Selective exposure and mood management processes in computer game play”.
The articles will be attached at the end of the blog post as a cute little button to press for your convenience. Without a shadow of a doubt, Dr. Bowman is a perfect fit for us and is going to be a great addition to our advising team of qualified mental health professionals. Any time that we can add to our foundation within the mental-health gaming community, it’s a happy day at the office for BetterPlay Studios and the KOZEE team.
When developing a product that directly works with mental health issues, it's our duty to make sure that what we are creating helps people the way that we want it to. In an effort to properly and ethically do that, involving researchers and psychologists in our work is at the forefront of our quality assurance. Dr. Bowman specifically is going to be an incredible asset on this front given his prior and current work with interactive media in psychological spaces.
Without a shadow of a doubt, Dr. Bowman shares our values and is going to be a great addition to our advising team of qualified mental health professionals. Any time that we can add to our foundation within the mental-health gaming community, it’s a happy day at the office for the KOZEE team.
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