Inner Overlap is a serious game that allows players to experience the inner world and outer life oDlD patients through first-person role-playing. The game combines rich narratives, puzzle tasks anccharacter interactions to educate players on the symptoms, causes and treatments of DiD, improveempathy and reduce social misunderstandings

Inner Overlap is divided into four levels. The first level tells the player the purpose of the whole game and the initial understanding of the symptoms of DID.The second level is about the causes and characteristics of DID under the guidance of the sub-personalities, while the third level involves working with the sub-personalities to face daily tasks, such as encountering traffic jams on the road, meeting neighbours on the way to school, etc. The last level is about the psychologist introducing the relevant treatment. And the last level involves a psychiatrist introducing relevant treatments. In order to make players feel immersed in the game, some challenges are set up, such as the anxiety challenge to simulate the co-morbidities of DID, switching between the first and the third viewpoints on the fly to simulate the experience of separation of DID patients, and the memory loss faced by DID patients. The player will also not feel the loss of time, and will keep looping back and forth on the way to the destination, as well as the player will need to manipulate the character to solve puzzles in the world of sub-personalities and then obtain memory fragments to restore their memory.

In order to explore whether serious games can help people better understand Dissociative Identity Disorder, thereby increasing public awareness and reducing misconceptions about DID, I designed and developed a game called Inner Overlap.In reviewing the literature, I found that the symptoms, causes, and treatments of DID are complex, and while there have been studies on the use of serious games in other fields, there have been very few studies on the use of serious games to teach about mental illness. I believe that serious games, due to their engaging and immersive nature, are an effective way of conveying complex information and are particularly suited to mental health issues such as DID. In designing Inner Overlap, I used the ADDIE model and Gagne’s nine pedagogical events and developed the game in Unity3D to help players understand DID, and collected both quantitative and qualitative data to ensure the game’s effectiveness with different groups.

An evaluation of the game’s effectiveness showed that the player’s understanding and empathy for DID significantly improved after playing the game. Quantitative data from the pre- and post-tests showed an increase in the rate of participants’ correct responses to DID-related questions. Qualitative analyses also supported this result, showing that players developed a deeper understanding of the challenges faced by people with DID. Despite the success of Inner Overlap in educating players about DID, I am aware of some limitations of the study. The small sample size makes it difficult to generalise the results to a larger population. There are also difficulties in accurately presenting the complex experience of DID in a game. How to ensure the accuracy of the educational content while keeping the game interesting is another major challenge. In addition, reliance on self-reported data may introduce bias, and participants may fail to fully or accurately describe their learning and experiences.