The lobby in LIFTnow, a game for insomnia education.
The lobby in LIFTnow, a game for insomnia education.
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16-year-old student creates LIFTnow in Minecraft as a game for treating insomnia

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 4 min

Varun Thvar wants to educate people about how they can get treatment for insomnia. That isn’t news, but Thvar is a 16-year-old student who has a unique approach to the problem: video games.

Thvar is releasing a game within the popular Minecraft platform that teaches people how to take care of themselves when it comes to dealing with the condition. Thvar calls it LIFTnow, which uses Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-i) techniques to educate people.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.