Задание 18 из ЕГЭ по английскому языку: задача 14

This Teenager Is Developing a Video Game That Assesses Your Mental Health

Rasha Alqahtani, an 18-year-old from Saudi Arabia, is determined to help her peers learn about their anxiety — in the wildly popular setting of ‘Minecraft.’ Alqahtani saw anxiety affect the lives of people around her — a family member, a “genius” schoolmate who’d cry with each test, strangers on the Internet. To some extent, she struggled with it herself, as “a straight-A student trying to keep perfection.” “I tried to heal myself, by myself, almost all of the time,” she says. “In Saudi Arabia, we are starting now to connect the dots and to raise awareness about mental health.”

Rasha resolved to do something about the anxiety she’d noticed around her, and the sense that taking the immediate step of going to a psychologist might scare some teens. However, Rasha believes getting a diagnosis is a crucial step for mental health: “Acknowledging that, ‘Oh, I have this thing. I’m going to accept having this thing. Now I will work on it ... It’s not going to be something that will hold me back.’” She also loves playing “Minecraft.” “I would just tear up to live in ‘Minecraft’ for a day. I really love it,” she says. So as the COVID-19 pandemic made her and so many others feel anxious, she proposed a research project that would use the familiar, fun format of a video game to evaluate players for anxiety.

Alqahtani put together a first draft of her test in two weeks. Rather than building a full-blown game from scratch, Rasha set her sights on what she calls a “feature,” a module that users would access within a preexisting video game. For the purposes of the prototype, she didn’t actually code the feature but instead produced a video simulation of what it would look like within the game of “Minecraft.” Rasha drew on one of her hobbies — she makes short films — and created a video that looked like “Minecraft: Story Mode,” in which players choose their own adventures by indicating how they’d like to respond to various scenarios.

In Alqahtani’s version, instead of deciding which character to save from a monstrous enemy, users choose how they’d react in different, potentially anxiety-provoking scenarios. In one instance, a friend says “Don’t bring your pet to the party. People will call us losers.” The player selects one of two options: “I’m not worried about them, we will have fun!” and “Oh! That will be so embarrassing and terrifying. I’m leaving my pet, but I’m afraid he will hurt himself.” In scoring the assessment, the latter option would get one point. A higher score, after completing 13 of these questions, should indicate higher anxiety levels.

The judging for the Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair happened during Ramadan, so the Saudi Arabian delegation participated late at night. Despite the fact that ISEF was a prestigious competition with as much as $75,000 on the line, Alqahtani says she wasn’t there for the glory: “I just said, ‘God, please, I’m doing this for the purpose of helping others. And I do not care if I win; I care if this will reach more people.”

Rasha gave strict orders to her professor father, poet mother, and four of her eight siblings to wait outside the room during the virtual awards announcements. If they heard screams of celebration, they could “burst into the room and just kill me with happiness,” she instructed. They did exactly that when she was named a third-award winner in the behavioral science division, an international accolade that came with a $1,000 prize.

“It’s kind of life-changing,” she says now. “You see that when you work this hard, people ... give you the appreciation you deserve.”

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What lesson did Rasha learn by winning?

1. You should listen to your family.
2. If you ask for something, it will happen.
3. Hard work leads to success and appreciation.
4. Video games are a waste of time.