A few years ago, Farmington Hills psychologist Ryan Blackstock, Psy.D., came up with the idea of creating a game about psychology.

However, the Michigan School of Professional Psychology professor wondered, “How could I make something fun? Most of what I do is on the serious end of the human experience. I wanted to make a game that spoofs therapy in some way.”

A self-described game lover, he has backed other game campaigns on Kickstarter, a crowdfunding website. Last week, Blackstock launched his own campaign for “Psycho!Therapist: The game of weird clients and WTF cures”. Players use cards to create clients with weird problems, then solve their problems with an equally weird set of tools.

kickstarter.com

Drawing cards in “Psycho!Therapist: The game of weird clients and WTF cures” gives you a client with a problem to treat.

The cards create an random element to the game, Blackstock said, describing what the patient does for a living, along with his or her problems and behaviors. Rolling dice adds another random element to the game.

“The last time I did the math, the possibilities (created by the cards) are in the millions,” he said.

The behaviors, Blackstock drew from real clinical problems that “grad school never prepares you for”, his own personal experience, and pure imagination – behavior that would be “strange, awkward, or annoying, that would prompt the player to want to treat it.”

As for the treatments, “I decided to be a little irreverent about this,” he said. “I don’t want people to try to imitate therapy.”

So he walked through his house and looked for items. A salad fork. Pillows. That sort of thing.

“In humanistic psychology, we really emphasize that good therapy is well-planned and spontaneous,” Blackstock said. “You have tools, the question is, how can you use them for the best chance of success?”

The game can be played several different ways, although there are two main game modes with variations, and Blackstock will add cards to the game if his campaign breaks through its $29,500 goal to achieve “stretch goals” that range up to $65,000.

“I’ve learned a lot from this process,” he said. “I’m not going to make a lot of money from this, the numbers just don’t work out that way. The experience of a pleasant evening with friends, that’s what I want to give people.”

To learn more about “Psycho!Therapist: The game of weird clients and WTF cures”, and how you can help bring it to life, visit Blackstock’s Kickstarter page.