
Clients for Assignment 3: Psychiatric Patient Simulation Design
Part of MIT's CMS.608 Game Design course from Fall 2010, this session brings in the clients for the term's third team assignment: a training simulation for psychiatry residents who must de-escalate agitated patients. Dr. Cezar Cimpeanu and Dr. James Cartreine lay out the clinical problem, drawing on research into assaults on psychiatric residents and tools like the Dynamic Appraisal of Situational Aggression for assessing imminent risk in inpatients. They walk through what conflict resolution actually looks like on a psychiatric ward, the warning signs residents are trained to watch for, and what a useful simulation would need to teach. The talk functions as a real-world design brief, grounding the game students' coursework in published psychiatric literature rather than abstract theory, and gives a concrete look at how clinical research gets translated into a training tool.