The company behind a 'mental health action shooter' envisions a health insurance-funded 'golden age' for gaming, and just got FDA clearance to treat stress

Imagine this: You tell your doctor that you're struggling with stress, and she sends you home with instructions to play videogames every week. Even better, your health insurance is going to cover a subscription to the game service, and maybe even a VR headset to play them on. That's the vision of Seattle-based company Deepwell DTx, and it's making real progress: the company's biofeedback software development kit for games just received FDA clearance for «over-the-counter treatments for the reduction of stress and as an adjunctive treatment for high blood pressure.»

Deepwell co-founder Ryan Douglas doesn't just think the news is good for patients (and certain medical device entrepreneurs), but also for gamers and game developers. Introducing games to the world's trillions of dollars in healthcare spending can «bring us back to the golden age of gaming,» he said on a call with me last week.

Deepwell has demonstrated its technology in VR game Zengence, which it calls a «mental health action shooter.» It sounds funny, since discussions about mental health and first-person shooters largely center on the claim that violent games disturb vulnerable young minds, but Douglas is convinced that not only are violent videogames not inherently harmful (a recent Stanford study and others agree), they're valuable therapeutic tools. «It turned out that the action genre was one of the most therapeutic we had,» Douglas told me during an earlier conversation in June.

Zengence isn't exactly Call of Duty, though: Its enemies are «wraiths» and you're shooting them with wizard beams, not hot lead. It uses the Meta Quest's microphone—this is the biofeedback component—to detect when the player is humming or chanting. When it picks up those meditative tones, which indicate that the player is exhaling, it sends an orb into the environment which reveals wraiths to zap with your mental health wand.

The basic idea is to get players into the relaxing, dopamine-rich «flow state» game designers and