A Study on the Effect of Gamification on Alleviation Anxiety Levels of the Elderly in China

As the problem of aging becomes increasingly serious, anxiety symptom has seriously affected the mental health of the elderly as a ubiquitous phenomenon in the elderly of China. Recently, a lot of researches show that gamification plays a positive role in relieving negative moods. This paper sorts out the gamification design strategies for the elderly to relieve anxieties and develops a collage game for the elderly according to this strategy: background, text and picture materials are used to make different subject patterns of collage and create own collage works. This game is used to verify the influence of gamification intervention means on the anxieties of the elderly as an intervention of control experiment. In this experiment, 42 participants were divided into two groups. The experiment group used gamification intervention, while the control group did not; STAI scale and galvanic skin were used to measure the change in the anxiety level of participants. According to the results, collage game for the elderly can relieve the anxiety state of the elderly, and most of the participants were free from usage pressure and relieved their anxieties during the game. Gamification seems to be a promising way to relieve the anxieties of the elderly. In the future work, it is necessary to make long-term experiments with a large sample size, so as to verify the influence of gamification intervention means on the reduction of anxieties, explore the influence of demography factor on the reduction of anxieties and sort out more targeted gamification intervention means.