How would you feel if you are struggling or feeling down about something? Sad? Scared? Or even depressed? Suddenly, there is someone who shows up, hugs you, makes you laugh and frees you from negative emotions! EMO-GYM is a game of emotions.
There are times you may feel enormous pressure. There are endless deadlines and not enough hours in the day. Feel too stressful and need to take a break?
It’s time to take all these burdens off your shoulder. Join EMO-GYM to exercise your tighten mind, make peace with stressful moments and connect with your friends.Try to be the happiest and supportive person in the game.
Our target learners are university students who suffered from mental health and afraid to seek help.
The values and goals of EMO-GYM are to make people feel better by playing simple positive psychology games. Also, our game design provides scenarios of daily challenges you might encounter every day. The idea aims to show how important it is to seek help and support others when you face stress in your life.
Project Manager, Game designer, Learning experience designer
Chronic stress is a huge and rising problem around the world and in America in particular. According to the American Psychological Association, as of 2014, 3/4ths of the country reported both physical and psychological symptoms from stress, nearly half felt that their stress was growing worse over time, and a third thought their stress levels could be classified as “extreme.” These trends are only worsening over time, as well.
In addition to these statistic numbers, we also consult with professional counselors to make sure our game can effectively address the mental health issues without being offensive or resulting in the negative results. The counselor suggested we deal with this issue in prevention rather than intervention. That is to say, we could design the game from self-care, raise awareness and supportive perspective instead of treatment aspects.
Emo-Gym is designed to address stress management techniques and strategies that can be applied to the real world as well as the general public, and that also might cheer up a stressed player and help them stabilize their mood and let off steam in the short run.
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EMO-GYM is a collaborative board game.
Every player has time tokens and emotion tokens. Time tokens will keep decreasing because players will encounter challenges.
Players will accumulate emotion tokens according to their strategic decisions.The final object of players is to accumulate emotion tokens as many as possible. When every player runs out of time, the person who has the most emotion tokens is the winner.
EMO-GYM is a collaborative board game.
Every player has time tokens and emotion tokens. Time tokens will keep decreasing because players will encounter challenges.
Players will accumulate emotion tokens according to their strategic decisions.The final object of players is to accumulate emotion tokens as many as possible. When every player runs out of time, the person who has the most emotion tokens is the winner.
In our first meeting, we located our target audience to college and graduate students and decided to design an educational game that will teach several strategies of positive psychology and stress management skills. During the second meeting, we came up with our first version and developed the basic rules for this game. The next step will be individual work for group members in terms of content design on all the cards (24 challenge cards/24 support cards/ 12 skill cards).
We observed users' facial expressions and behaviors. Users thought our game boring and the only thing they did during the game playing was read the sentences on the cards.
The bigger problem is the magic school setting which involved too specific details (e.g. magic spells or character names) of the books and movies -- not user-friendly for players who were not familiar with this magic world.
Some people told us that there were too many texts on the cards and that the challenges were not engaging and relevant to the players.
Moreover, we didn’t provide options for players so they didn’t have the chance to make strategic decisions. They couldn’t really get the collaborative messages our game tried to convey.
It was not collaborative, chaotic and there are no interactions between players. We also found some tasks on the support cards are not realistic and boring.
We change the setting to daily life events and put more efforts on how to involve decision making processes and reward system to make it more interesting instead of the sugar-coated broccoli. According to Shute and Ke (2012), good games require ongoing interaction, a sense of control from the players, ongoing feedback and uncertainty.
We add options to the challenge cards to make our game more strategic oriented. We increase functions of skill cards to make reward system more intriguing. We add competition elements and ask players to compete for both emotion tokens and for the opportunities to support others (eg. Grabbing the I can help sign). Originally, we tried to make players play as a team, but uuring the redesign process, we did a rapid prototyping and played the second version by ourselves and settled down specific details we didn’t notice when designing.