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To accomplish this, STRIVE was initially designed as a multi-episode interactive narrative in VR, akin to being immersed within a “Band of Brothers” type storyline of events that could occur during a combat deployment. At the end of each of the five to seven-minute episodes, an emotionally challenging event occurs, designed in part from feedback provided by SMs undergoing PTSD treatment (e.g., seeing/handling human remains, death/injury of a squad member, death/injury of a civilian child, disturbing culturally relative and morally challenging situations, etc.). At that point in the episode, the virtual world “freezes in place” and an intelligent virtual human (VH) “mentor” emerges from the midst of the chaotic VR scenario to guide the user through a variety of resilience-related psychoeducational and self-management tactics, as well as providing rational restructuring exercises for appraising and processing the virtual experience. The VH mentor presents resilience training content that is relevant to the VR context and narrative just experienced and draws on the types of strategies and content that has been endorsed as part of standard classroom-delivered DoD resilience training programs, as well as content that has been successfully applied in non-military contexts (e.g., humanitarian aid workers, sports psychology, etc.). In this fashion, STRIVE provides a digital “emotional obstacle course” that can be used as a tool for providing experiences that leverage narrative-based, context-relevant experiential learning of emotional coping strategies under very tightly controlled and scripted simulated conditions. Leveraging the power of narrative combined with the experiential learning made possible with simulation technology has always been at the core of the USC Institute for Creative Technologies’ (ICT) mission. STRIVE is the embodiment of this mission applied to psychological resilience.
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