You can download Meander for free, but making a small donation via Kofi will help to support Ludogogy, and make it possible for us to develop more games for download.

Meander is a game about Mindful Walking, which only requires the single card – and your imagination and willingness to play. You can play it in two modes. Question mode invites you to use the card and your walk to answer a question of significance for you, whereas Meander mode simply invites you to enjoy the experience of having your attention pulled from one thing to another as you walk.

The post Meander Download first appeared on Ludogogy.

At the extremes this can include fantasy experiences – experiencing lives from history, or those that only exist as fictions. More prosaic game experiences have been created that specifically aim to invoke the lived experience of people who one could meet, living on the planet today – potentially with the aim of creating empathy in the player.

The magic circle, being magic, of course, these ideas can be mixed, in whatever proportions are desired, to create game experiences which are both situations one is never going to encounter, and a realistic depiction of real everyday life for some people.

A good example of this is Hellblade:Senua’s Sacrifice, which is both a combat/puzzle game with a fantasy setting, and an experience of psychosis, created with neuroscientists, mental health specialists and people living with the condition.

Hellblade is available on Amazon

As someone who has ADHD, I am particularly interested in depictions of neurodivergent experience and cognitive differences in games, and in the media in general. There is so much opportunity to create understanding, and alongside that, so much need to evaluate the potential both for good and for harm, as well as issues such as representation, ensuring that neurodivergent people have a say in how their experiences are portrayed.

We all live inside our heads, and it is often difficult to understand that other people do not necessarily ‘operate’ in the same way. We have all experienced that shock when someone we know well and like, suddenly reveals through a chance comment, that their values in relation to some issue lie very far from our own. Throughout my life, despite feeling ‘different’ from childhood onwards, I have nevertheless worked on the assumption that the internal experiences of other people were similar to my own. It was only with the realisation that I had ADHD, as an adult, that I began to understand the true extent of the differences in my experiences of both the outside, and inside, world compared to the neurotypical people around me.

Is Point of View important?

Games potentially give us the opportunity to overcome this kind of misconception, by creating ‘other’ experiences and allowing us to step into them. Arguably first-person games are the best vehicle for this. It is notable, therefore, that Hellblade takes a third person visual perspective, despite some of the other sensory aspects of the game e.g. the constant voices which Senua hears, being ‘first person’. Many players have noted this and there are even first person mods which have been created.

For most players, the POV does not spoil the immersion. The game has been widely praised, particularly because it ‘shows’ rather than ‘tells’. It could have given us ‘facts’ about psychosis through text prompts, or even by having Senua tell another character that she ‘hears voices’, but instead it subjects us to a constant uncomfortable soundtrack of whispers.

A less immersive approach is taken in the game ‘Max: An Autistic Journey’, but then the goal here is not stepping into Max’s shoes, but to ‘help explain to everyone a typical day for a ten year old who has autism’. It was developed by Max’s father, Stéphane Cantin.

The game uses a mixture of storytelling, instructive pop-ups which explain aspects of autism and the behaviour of the character of Max, in a number of everyday situations, to give a window into the real Max’s experience.

While both ‘Senua’ and ‘Max’ have the effect of educating, the latter does it more explicitly, and there are many games out there which aim, through immersion or instruction, or a mixture of both, to explain neurodivergent experience, to an audience who does not share those experiences.

For example, Auti-sim, which lets players experience sensory overload, which some people with autism and also some with ADHD can experience. Or the promise of VR and other technologies to allow others to dive into neurodivergent experience.

There are also of course, games which aim to help neurodivergent people navigate the world, as this article from AxonPlay shows, but a broader consideration of neurodivergence even in pure entertainment games, would be good not just for neurodivergent people, but the game industry itself. What that might mean is discussed in this article for Ludogogy about designing with neurodivergence in mind.

But arguably mainstream games are the route to take for wider empathy, understanding and destigmatisation, simply because they don’t require the audience to have a prior interest in being ‘educated’.

So, how is that going?

Well, a bit of a curate’s egg, to be honest. For every Senua’s Sacrifice, Sea of Solitude or In Sound Mind, all of which were developed by or with the help of people with lived experience, there are dozens of games which portray neurodivergence in more problematic ways or are simply ill-informed.

Sea of Solitude is available on Amazon

There are relatively few protagonists or characters in games who are explicitly presented as neurodivergent, so quite often fans have to discover these ‘coded’ characters for themselves. In the case of one of the most celebrated autistic characters in gaming, Symettra in Overwatch, the developers only acknowledged that she was autistic after considerable public fan speculation.

In Sound Mind is available on Amazon

Phoenix Wright in the Ace Attorney games is likewise believed by many to demonstrate many traits of ADHD. And certainly, when I played the game, I really appreciated the game play and many small touches that felt like playing in my own skin, using small details to build a larger problem solving strategy (often prioritising what seem unimportant to others), lateral thinking, his ability to ‘read’ people very accurately, and of course the strong drive for justice and ‘the truth’ which many people with ADHD feel very keenly.

Ace Attorney is available on Amazon

But often neurodivergent coded characters are used in games, and other media in less useful ways. And many neurodivergent people complain that traits which are seen as ‘quirky’, funny or endearing in fictional characters are exactly those which people find hardest to deal with when encountering real neurodivergent people.

In films and TV, this criticism has been levelled at characters such as Sheldon Cooper, or more recently at Jenna Ortega’s portrayal of Wednesday Addams. There are a number of potential problems.

Traits which are recognisable as neurodivergent, are being exploited to produce entertainment, to make a character ‘weird’ or the butt of jokes, which embeds the idea that this is an acceptable way to think about real neurodivergent people, or to regard them as a collection of stereotypical ‘symptoms’ rather than as people just like oneself.

The traits and behaviours displayed are often stereotypical and do not reflect a rounded human being, so characters are just tropes of neurodivergence.

The fact that the characters are ‘coded’ rather than explicit, can be very damaging too, as it allows for ambiguity. Some people see Wednesday Addams as simply rude and socially cold, not autistic. And yet the ‘coding’ allows for these two things to sit side-by-side in public discourse without explicit explanation. Autistic people are not rude and insensitive, but some of them display behaviours which can be interpreted by others in that way. There is an important distinction which is essential to understanding that the outward appearance of neurodivergent behaviour is not the same as inward ‘character faults’.

Both Wednesday and Sheldon exemplify another fundamental problem of representation. These are (very obviously, though coded) neurodivergent characters being portrayed by people without that lived experience. One easy route to better representation would be simply to include a greater number of explicitly neurodivergent characters in games and other media, and to have those characters portrayed by actually neurodivergent people.

And even the games which have received plaudits for their representation tend to share one final overriding characteristic. They tend to fall in the horror genre.

Why are neurodivergent character always in horror games?

Is this a problem – well, like most things, yes and no.

Obviously, it is distinctly unhelpful to perpetuate tropes that present neurodivergent people as ‘monsters’ – a particularly pernicious form of ‘othering’, but how about if they are the protagonists battling for survival – like Senua?

As much as I like to celebrate the positive sides of my ADHD – the creativity, the hyperfocus, there is much about it that is debilitating, and, yes, on occasions, even horrific – sensory overload, rejection sensitivity, lack of sleep. Many neurodivergent people report that playing horror survival games are therapeutic or cathartic – helping them to reflect usefully on their lived experience.

So it is not necessarily the fact that neurodivergent characters tend to populate horror games which is the issue, but the fact that they are relatively rare elsewhere. It is an issue of representation – as if neurodivergence only has one story to tell, and it is a story of surviving horror.

If you imagine a TV show about a team of talented and dedicated investigators, and the only time that a Muslim character ever appears is if the creators of the show want to tell a story about terrorism. This happens quite a lot, but it does (and should) make many people uncomfortable when they see it.

We should feel the same kind of discomfort when we see yet another horror survival game peopled with ‘quirky’ characters, and ask ourselves “What about all the other stories this beautiful diversity of mind could tell us?”

The post The Other – Neurodivergence in Games first appeared on Ludogogy.

While knowledge, and the dissemination of facts is important – we have seen the results when misinformation and disinformation, is widely spread, it would appear that simply ’knowing more’, or having access to ‘better’ information is not enough to foster meaningful action on some of our most pressing issues.

How Games Move US – Emotion by Design is available on Amazon

Knowledge is like a raw material, but we need properly honed tools to work with it to achieve something. One important cognitive tool is critical thinking, but even that proves to be lacking when it comes to action such as protecting the future of the planet, aiding and protecting vulnerable others (human and otherwise) or recognising the morality (or otherwise) of specific actions.

We may ‘know’ the rights and wrongs of some situation, but still find ourselves choosing inaction, or looking away. It seems only emotional ‘tools’ are enough to tip us into action. Empathy is often cited as chief among these. Surely if we could only ‘step into the shoes’ of the desperate people who have travelled to these shores in small boats, we could never consider packing them into planes and sending them to Rwanda, for example.

But is it as simple as that, and if it is, how can games-based learning, or gameful design make us more empathic?

Types of Empathy

The above example shows us only one kind of empathy, however. According to psychologists, there are three types. If we were moved (and, importantly, also had the agency) to make the decision to act humanely towards refugees and not send them to Rwanda, we would be exercising Compassionate empathy.

That, in turn could have been prompted by either of the other two kinds of Empathy.

Cognitive empathy is an intellectual understanding of the feelings of another person. It is important in communication, because it allows us to state our thoughts in a way that will effectively reach the other person. Sometimes called ‘hard’ empathy, it is important to remember that this is not equivalent to being ‘unfeeling’. This is the kind of empathy that needs to be exercised by those in the medical or caring professions. If they allowed themselves to feel the third kind of empathy, they would likely buckle under the emotional strain, and be unable to care effectively for themselves or others.

Emotional empathy is sometimes described as ‘feeling what others feel’. It is a deeper identification with the emotional state of another. Deanna Troi, the Star Trek empath, exhibited this form of empathy, where she actually shared the emotions of the person she was feeling. If we are not half Betazoid, we usually do this by remembering what we felt like when going through a similar experience, or if we have not had such an experiencing, by imagining what it would feel like if we did.

Who or what can we have empathy for?

I once designed a game, which was billed as ‘eliciting empathy for an ecosystem’. In reality, this is impossible, for two reasons. Empathy as it is described above, can only ever really be felt for other members of our own species. It requires that we understand and share the same cognitive processes. We cannot ‘share’ or even have intellectual understanding of our cat’s feelings, because we have no idea what cat emotions are like. This obviously applies even more to non-sentient entities such as ‘The Planet’, or an ecosystem (even though they comprise living beings).

However, we can exercise something that looks and feels a lot like empathy in two ways. Firstly, we do have a ‘recognition’, if not an understanding, of what certain emotional states, such as distress, look like when they are demonstrated, so we can act to prevent or mitigate them, of keep acting in the same way to enhance what looks to us like ‘happiness’.

Secondly, and starting to move into ‘playfulness’, we can imagine what it would be like to be both ourselves (with all the cognitive and emotional equipment that implies), and the entity we are trying to ‘empathise’ with. We anthropomorphise the animal and endow it with human feelings and thought processes. Arguably we can do the same with ‘The Planet’. Indeed, the concept of Gaia does this very thing.

And this is an important idea to consider if we want to design learning games, or other playful activities to facilitate empathy. Research has shown that the more (evolutionarily) distant a species is from us, the less likely we are to show compassion for it. This is why cuddly mammals work much better as poster children for environmental charities, even when snails or insects may have more ecosystem ‘importance’ in the specific ecological niche being discussed. So, this first step of making an entity ‘more like’ us when designing an empathy intervention, may have considerable impact on its effectiveness

Playful Empathy

Game which have empathy as a central theme often put us in ‘another person’s shoes’. Of course, there are no limits of the characters we can play in a game setting, so this would imply that they are an ideal medium for allowing us to play other genders or races, or to experience cognitive or physical differences, or even to live in another time or be another species.

Bury Me My Love is an immersive and affecting experience of the story of a Syrian refugee, but you don’t always have to play the victim or the ‘good guy’ to appreciate how systems affect people’s actions and outcomes Papers Please, puts you in the role of a border guard and is an increasingly uncomfortable experience as you play.

Another game which takes you into the experience of a refugee is Salaam by Lual Mayen,

While these games allow you to play a role, if you are after an actual tabletop RPG, then the ultimate tabletop experience is provided by Logan – where you get to play (your own) version of the designer’s real-life experiences.

The Troubled Life of Billy Kerr, a board game, puts you into a medical care setting, where you work as part of a medical team caring to a terminally ill man. Can you keep him alive long enough to hear his story, which also will reveal the story of those caught up in the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland? Thank you to Michala Liavaag for telling me about this game.

Human beings are wired to respond to narrative, and again, this is where games and similar playfully designed experience perform well. Many award winning titles such as Life is Strange and If Found use queer and trans characters and rich storytelling to present queer experience that moves well beyond stereotypes to present a the full gamut of emotional highs and lows

And because playful design doesn’t have to mean ‘games’, we can visit the wonderful travelling exhibits of the Empathy Museum to hear real stories, told by real voices in the Human Library exhibit, among many others.

Immersion is an important characteristic of games which aim to elicit empathy, and all the above meet that brief. But if you want to technological help, then VR would seem to be the logical choice. Project Empathy is all about making impactful experiences for social awareness and change. Their first project was based in a US prison.

One of the most famous empathy principles, which has been around for way longer than games-based learning is the ‘Seven Generation’ principle of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, which requires that every action one takes should be viewed in terms of its impact on the seventh generation which will follow you.

There are a number of ‘playful’ activities based on this idea. One particular favourite of mine involves both reflection on the future impacts of one’s actions as well as encouraging some analysis of your own moral compass, as you have to explain yourself. The premise is simple – take a piece of paper and write to your seventh generation descendants, explaining why are doing what you are doing, or making the decisions that feel necessary now.

Examples I would like to give here, but cannot think of any games which quite meet the criteria just now are:

• Something that takes the 7 generation idea and expands on it to emphasise one’s role in a long ‘chain’ of life with impacts from decisions which reverberate down the decades, centuries and millennia.
• A game where you play both the impacting ‘bad-guy’ and the unfortunate victim of their decisions, with equal emphasis. I did create a game like this, but it is my client’s IP (and part of an internal corporate learning programme) so I can’t use it as an example.

If you know any such games, I’d love to hear about them, so they can take their proper place in this article.

The post The What and Why of Empathy in Games first appeared on Ludogogy.

The game is available on Leslie’s site, where you can access a one week free trial of the online version (the one we are playing in this video) and order the board game.

The Loss and Remembrance game, also mentioned in the video is free to play, and you can find out more about Leslie’s other games at the Trance4Mation website.

The post Keep It Real Game – Live Play Session first appeared on Ludogogy.

I spent 35 years working in marginalized communities, to include working with the schizophrenic population in homeless shelters, an emergency shelter for runaway and homeless youth, was a Clinical Supervisor for residences for homeless young adults, created, implemented and supervised Creative Arts programs for at-risk youth in failing inner city schools for six years, facilitated Poetry workshops at the Riker’s Island Women’s Jail, was a Department of Defense Reintegration Specialist, and much more.

I am also a therapist in private practice who has a history of my own significant mental health challenges, many of which I have overcome, and some that I struggle with daily. I did not plan to develop games, or to create a Company to deliver these games. However, it always amazed me that with all of our incredible innate human capacity for understanding, connection and love – we have very few resources or tools to encourage and help us to grow, enhance and put into practice these capacities amongst and with our fellow human beings. So many of us feel entirely isolated, rejected, alone, unloved or cared for, with no one to talk to and no way to give meaning to our experiences.

I never consciously decided to create games. My first creation, the Keep It Real game came to me, almost as if in a visitation, with all of the categories and mechanics in place. And as in pregnancy, pushed me from the inside to develop it fully and get it out into the world. The Keep It Real game is all about the human condition, with 720 questions about life for us all to engage in together. It is a mixture of very deep questions, more neutral questions, and hilarious physical group interactions and fun challenges. Seeing it played, I realized that this blend lowers defenses and engages even the most resistant people, most of the time.

Because of my experiences working with diverse populations prior to my developing my games, it was clear to me that unique groups have unique problems, which due to stigma and lack of access or resources are rarely, if ever addressed, and need specialized, personalized solutions. So, I developed a number of specialized games to address these populations.

Sitting with groups of people, many who for the first time are openly sharing their stories, emotions and experiences through these games, deeply enriches my life, my spirit and my soul. It is an incredible gift that I have this opportunity. As the games bring us all into our humanity, they cross all barriers and allow us to build bridges and understand those from walks of life we may never otherwise engage with. As I sit with the incarcerated, those in the gang life, violence interrupters, College Professors, Corporate leaders, etc. , as we all enter into our humanity together, I am often reminded that I do not know where I would be right now if I had not created these opportunities for me to stretch and to grow, enhance and share my own humanity. In this world where it is so easy to go numb and to check out, where many of us are overwhelmed and lose touch with ourselves to some extent, I remain entirely grateful for my Keep It Real “visitation” which propelled me into this ongoing encounter with the kaleidoscope of the human experience.

Check out the play session of the Keep It Real game which Leslie co-hosted with Ludogogy.

The post My Journey to Becoming a Game Designer first appeared on Ludogogy.

I sometimes like to counter the question ‘what can games teach?’ With ‘what can’t they teach?’. Jane McGonigal created a game to teach herself healthy behaviours for recovery from a serious brain injury, and that game has gone on to help thousands around the world improve their mental health and resilience. There’s anecdotal evidence to show that playing games has helped protestors to organise. Games have helped millions around the world find new ways to connect and socialise during a global pandemic.

Superbetter (the book) by Jane McGonigal is available on Amazon

One growing way for games to have a real impact on people’s development is the burgeoning use of tabletop role-playing games, particularly Dungeons & Dragons, for therapy. The Game to Grow non-profit ‘provides gaming groups for therapeutic, educational, and community growth’ and ‘promote awareness of the life-enriching potential of games across the world’.

Their flagship game is a roleplaying game of their own creation, developed after using Dungeons & Dragons for many years. The testimonials speak for themselves, with parents citing benefits from improved interaction skills to better impulse control to kids coming out of their shells. But the games they run are not just for children, and if we think through what role-playing games help people to learn and reflect on about themselves and their behaviours, it’s easy to see why.

Role-playing games set a stage for agency and exploration

In a game of Dungeons & Dragons, or a similar role-playing game, you create a character, through which you act. That avatar acts as a shield. You are not saying what you think or what you’d do, but what the character thinks or does. So you can try and test things, and connect with a viewpoint that may be different from your own.

With the help of the Dungeon Master or Games Master, you guide that character through a world of challenges: a space to test actions and consequences. A space where you can try things because any failure is game-based more than personal. A space where the challenges and journey mirror real-life things: you have to collaborate with the rest of the group and with some of the world’s inhabitants you meet along the way.

And you participate in a story arc, where your agency and your decisions result in your story beats. Any victory is yours, because you earned it. Anything more complex, including defeat, is yours to reflect on. And the game can raise all kinds of issues that you can be a part of: if a local village is engaged in an armed uprising against landowner taxes, whose side do you take? Why? What are the consequences, good and bad? And what does that say about you?

Real and relevant skills grow out of role-playing games

Whether your role-playing session is specifically a therapy session with a licensed therapist or not, if it’s a good session, this is likely to ask of you that you:

• Use social skills to persuade others and win them over
• Build and use esteem and confidence
• Co-operate and collaborate effectively to get results
• See things from others perspectives
• Take your turn and consider other players in the game
• Express yourself and your needs
• Creatively solve problems

And these skills don’t stay in the session. One participant in Megan A Connell’s Self-Rescuing Princess Girls’ Group said of a situation outside the session:

“I realized in the situation my character would not have said yes to this, so I decided to do what she would do, and I said no.”

The research is difficult, because every game of Dungeons & Dragons, or any other role-playing game, is individual – it’s hard to have a control and test group. But there is a growing body of research, and strong links have been found between role-playing and social skills, battling depression, moral development, suicide prevention, and a host of other positive effects.

Role-playing games can inspire learning game design of all stripes

This information is particularly useful if you’re somebody who could directly benefit from this, or a parent or carer of somebody who could. And with a positive psychology outlook, that shouldn’t be limited to those who are struggling. But what about learning game designers? What about educators, or L&D managers?

I think very little is as instructive as looking at what works well in one situation and asking how it can be adapted or learned from in another. If you’re looking to find, commission or design a solution that will help with some of the kinds of behaviours and skills listed, then look for something that works on some of the same levels. We can learn from how role-playing games:

• Encourage collaboration by making success contingent on it
• Set open challenges that players use creativity to solve
• Allow players to explore their identity by creating and playing another
• Bring about feelings that relate to real-life experiences, such as exaltation, challenge, uncertainty, empathy and others, and give space to explore them
• Allow agency and testing of actions and consequences

These are just a brief selection. In many ways, role-playing games are the most open and flexible games of all. Play isn’t limited by a programming language or the components supplied in the box. You’re limited only by your will and imagination.

This makes it a petri dish for what imagination can achieve – and where it excels, game designers and learning experience designers can and should learn from it. With the sheer amount that role-playing games can help unlock, the possibilities for players learning about themselves, and growing as people, are endless.

The post Dungeons & Dragons & Development first appeared on Ludogogy.

Many artists frequently work from home. I’m one of them. When Covid19 hit in March 2020, my friends were NOT surprised to hear that I continued to paint.

But, learning? Co-designing and releasing puzlkind, a multi-player jigsaw application with voice chat…?

“People I could have foreseen building an app??? SJ, you don’t even make the short list,” said a friend of three decades.

Shall I back up a bit?

In 2011 I had moved from Seattle, Washington to Seekonk, Massachusetts and found myself in a small town, carless and recovering from physical injury. Thankfully the local library offered handy recreation. And I fell in love—with their jigsaw puzzles! No batteries required and totally silent, this old-fashioned mode of re-creation/creation simultaneously occupied my active fingers and soothed my anxious mind.

Some months later, when healed and functioning, I finished a totally surprising and very orange painting called “This Is a Life Worth Living.” This painting resonated with friends and strangers alike. In that same chapter of life, I found myself spending many hours in hospital waiting rooms staring at tattered copies of People magazine as my partner’s mother’s life dwindled. I yearned for something aesthetically pleasing and possibly communal. Some way for us to connect in our suspended state of longing. As an experiment, I decided to transform my new painting into a 1000pc jigsaw puzzle. And so began a multi-year odyssey. The filmmaker/painter became a puzzle zealot.

Solo jigsaw puzzle assembly offered me easily digestible lessons: incremental progress, the importance of breaks, changing perspectives. When a film curator wrote me a letter describing how said puzzle helped her through chemotherapy I was thrilled. I began to make mini-puzzles for the infusion units at our local hospital. Cognitive distraction from simultaneously chemotherapy seemed potentially useful.

I continued to expand my designs and found joy in round puzzles. Local retailer Kurry Davis Jacob and I began hosting public Puzzle and Pie Happy Hours. During these casual encounters I observed magic happening.  Co-creation seemed to improve people’s moods. Or was it the strawberry rhubarb pie?

In 2018 advanced practice psychiatric nurse, Beverly Waldman Rich, invited me to perform a short puzzle assembly workshop with her highly stressed junior level nursing students. Bev and I were equally amazed when the students opened up about their vulnerabilities and self-doubts. After puzzling together these students felt relaxed and heard, which seemed to have a salubrious benefit! A year later Bev brought me to Rhode Island’s Bradley Hospital as a “puzzle specialist” for her doctoral research. I ran one group puzzling workshop with a cohort of clinically depressed adolescents to see how mindfulness training could improve their affect. We were astounded when, after an initial session, our initially antagonistic teens bounded from our conference room to their parents arms, joyfully declaring their future plans: veterinarian, surgeon, artist… Somehow puzzling together had seeded self-esteem. Of all the mindful activities offered, the participants rated my puzzle workshop as their favorite. Dr. Rich was excited to continue this exploration of puzzling and behavioral modification.

Having found her research in a footnote of Jane McGonigal’s ‘SuperBetter’ I reached out to Dr. Xiaomeng “Mona” Xu at Idaho State University to help me understand the neurochemical processes. We secured a small grant to hold a larger puzzle workshop for her community for Spring 2020. In the meantime, other organizations hosted my workshops. I offered sequential writing exercises in tandem with puzzle assembly. And, of course, pie. The applications for this model seemed endless and exciting – social justice and faith-based organizations commissioned puzzles, university professors and municipal teams hosted me for workshops, and library programmers invited me to puzzle with their inter-generational patrons.

SuperBetter by Jane McGonigal is available from Amazon

Each workshop allowed me to observe people entering that well-adored “flow state” – and doing so together.

And then came COVID-19. No amount of hand-sanitizer was enough to keep us together.

I shared my frustration with Michael Ferrier, a dear friend and veteran multiplayer game programmer (Puzzle Together, Remote Viewing Tournament, War of Conquest).  Mike suggested the metaverse as the new home for my puzzles and attendant workshops.

I resisted.  I prefer the world in 3D, not pixels.

He ignored me, wise soul, and showed me a skeletal version of a multiplayer jigsaw puzzle application in June of 2020. We performed a beta test and voila. I was converted.

December graphic designer Ruth Chung joined our Puzlkind journey to promote peace – well-being – via co-creation, connection, and inclusion. Jigsaw puzzles for joy and justice.

As homage to my 2015 “puzzle and pie happy hours” we built an in-app Happy Hour and scheduled our first one on Pi Day, March 14, 2021.

I received my first of many lessons that day:

Be prepared to answer all questions and explain EVERYTHING.

Ten minutes before the event I received a phone call: “Sarah Jane, can you send us the Zoom link?”

“It’s, um, not on Zoom. It’s an app. “

“A what? Hold on, let me move find the browser “

This was a preview of many onboarding experiences to follow.

Explaining to non-digital natives that an app is not a Zoom session.

Explaining that giving microphone access will not necessarily invite the FBI into your living room.

Explaining that the microphone actually picks up that whole conversation you and your boyfriend are having about laundry.

Cardboard jigsaw puzzles had been the perfect intergenerational platform for co-education. No batteries required, no instructions needed. And suddenly I had made a deep dive into a world that seemed to create barriers left and right.  I had made something that required me to learn how to bring the public to a new place. I needed to learn how to make a game to bring people to a game.

Veteran game designers chuckled when I shared my conundrum. They said, “Let us teach each other to help support the differently-abled in the virtual world.”

But how?

This morning I found my notes from a fall workshop co-hosted by ReImagine End of Life and Holistic Underground run by Mazin Jamal and Raquel Najera. In BOLD LETTERS I had printed:

TAKE FOCUS OFF SELF AND FOCUS ON SERVICE

“ASK – WHO IS COMING? and WHAT DO THEY NEED?

Ask yourself, Do you want to invite them? Or INCLUDE THEM?

Here in the U.S.A. many of us pray daily to create MLK’s Beloved Community – Equity, Solidarity, and Access.

Can a humble jigsaw puzzle app bring about that magnitude of change?

The post Puzlkind – the Healing Potential of Jigsaws first appeared on Ludogogy.

“All of man’s misfortune comes from one thing, which is not knowing how to sit quietly in a room.” – Pascal, Pensées (1670)

“The only good thing for man is to be diverted so that he will stop thinking about his circumstances.” – Pascal, Pensées (1670)

Philosophy of the Bedroom and Home Entertainment

In his Pensées, French philosopher Blaise Pascal introduces us to two ideas that resonate particularly in the early 2020s:

First, an observation: It is part of our human condition – and not just a modern trend – to be unable to “sit quietly in a room”, as it echoes our mortality. At all times, humans have suffered and avoided loneliness, boredom, and the anxiety linked to facing our fragile existence.

Second, a workaround: Seeking solace in activity is an escape from experiencing our metaphysical fears. Pascal gives a definition of entertainment as a necessity to prevent us from overthinking our finitude and embrace our restlessness. Note that Pascal includes sports, war, and work within entertainment.

In 2020, two billion people have been forced into lockdown, and therefore into facing their inner fears – this accentuated by the deadly count of the pandemic. The bedroom in which we used to spend chosen and limited time in between two occurrences of outside activity, has become a physical and mental prison cell.

Following Pascal’s wisdom, at the peak of the pandemic, two philosophical attitudes have been available to help us face our confinement at home: Home Entertainment and Mindfulness. It comes as no surprise that both industries have been booming during the pandemic. Meditation apps are expected to reach $2b by 2022. Streaming services revenue increased by 30% in a year, with subscribers enjoying an average 5 subscriptions compared to 3 before the pandemic.

X-ing from Home: New frontiers and dynamics

During the pandemic, many of the activities we were used to conducting outside of the home were transferred partially or completely inside the home. As new dynamics surface, the frontier between the exterior and the interior of the home is moving.

Activities that we used to perform outside have been mostly conducted from home, bringing within the realm of the home – and with the support of online technologies – exterior elements such as: work, education, entertainment, exercising, shopping, befriending, and dating.

In addition, behaviors that are casual parts of home life have been intensified, sometimes to the point of exaltation or rupture, such as caring for each other or fighting with each other.

As part of the moving home dynamics, “escaping from home” also gained in importance to allow us to rebalance our mental health. Escaping the home, physically and virtually, changed in nature along the pandemic as we were craving for mental rest, nature hunt, and a new social.

Socializing in a distance around leisure and renewed rites of passage

If the pandemic popularized locutions such as community spread, sheltering, isolation, social distancing, it also celebrated front line heroes, essential workers, random acts of kindness, zooming, and joyscrolling. The evolution of our vocabulary reflects how the quarantine triggered our social nature. In addition to work and education, our socialization needs include connecting with family, friends, and romantic partners.

The pandemic recreated our social connections around the following modalities: sharing online activities (yoga, cooking, drawing tutorials) and conversing thanks to social networks and communication tools (Houseparty, Clubhouse, Tiktok, Amigo, Bumble), as well as nurturing distant in-person interaction (garage gym, balcony clap for heroes, outdoor movie nights).

We also revamped our rites of passage along these two lines: online graduations, streamed Thanksgiving dinner, wedding broadcast, funeral on zoom; outdoor banquet with wrapped treats, drive-through birthday party, Halloween trunk-or-treat, newborn introduction behind a window.

Our homes adapted consequently indoors with private rooms for intimate conversation, cosy area for online reception, and outdoors with garden remodeling for party hosting and garage cleaning for socially distant interaction.

Leisuring from home or from a distance

Larger access to culture is probably one of the most significant silver linings of the 2020 pandemic. As people had plenty of time closed at home, less social life, and a need to recenter themselves to balance home chores, work, and parenting, they dedicated more time to hobbies.

Reading acted as a refuge: 35% of people in the world read more books in 2020. Especially parents took more time reading with their children (Source: Global English Editing).

Culture, Music and Arts turned to AR, VR, and Mixed Reality: Museums shut their physical doors, but they created new ways for the public to tour their collections virtually (the Louvre, the MET). Paris Opera streamed its performances for free and ballet dancers filmed themselves dancing from their apartments. Stars led by Lady Gaga took part in the “One World: Together At Home” concert. Musicians gave concerts in immersive reality settings such as electronic violinist Lindsey Stirling.

Movies switch screens: As traditional theaters closed, drive-in gained in popularity. Paris offered a floating movie theater on the Seine. Streaming services have been the big winners of the pandemic with an increase of 44% in viewing time.

Sports events happened in a bubble: Many sports events have been canceled, but despite players getting COVID, NBA games were played in an isolation zone at the Disney World Bubble. Outdoors classes, garage gym, and indoor fitness had an immense success. Peloton doubled its sales in 2020.

Friends and family shared tutorials of anything possible: Cultural practice seemed less about status than acquiring new skills and sharing a common experience, be it about ballet dancing, cartooning, writing poetry, or launching a podcast!

Now what? The Future of Leisuring.

As we listen to signals from the future and investigate the driving forces in our current STEEP environment (Social, Technological, Economical, Environmental, Political), we broke down our future to three plausible scenarios:

1 – Back to the familiar: “We are social animals with physical bodies and haven’t forgotten about it. Big venues, outdoors, and travels will be fully available again.”

When the pandemic is over, we go back to our dinner parties. We welcome back the exterior world within the realm of our homes. We yearn for physical presence, body odors, non-distorted voices, human faces without masks, smiles, hugs, and more!

We have never craved that much the big outdoors, cultural life, and intellectual connections with peers. We go back to our old habits, movie nights, sports classes, travels. Renovated venues reopen and welcome large audiences for live events.

Signals:

• During the pandemic, young adults defied rules to date in hiding.
• Churches defied lockdown with back-door entrance and secret Church services.
• Our body needs vitamin D from sunlight, endorphins from exercising, oxytocin from relationships.
• $500M entertainment venue and hotel complex planned in Toronto.

2 – Pandemic-frozen: “We have tasted more immersive experiences and enjoyed it. Now comes the reign of AR/VR/MR. Culture comes to our home, it is more inclusive. Social life happens online anyway!”

The pandemic made us prioritize our relationships and we now go for lean. We avoid meeting in person unless necessary. Dating happens primarily online without leading to in-person. We move away from exterior social life to focus on the nuclear family.

The pandemic forced cultural institutions to renovate themselves. Culture is available worldwide. Mixed reality technology enables enhanced online experience. We share it in close circles in our home entertainment centers. The home has become a movie theater and the scene of our own talents.

Signals:

• We rediscover the concept of “positive solitude”.
• Tiktok launches a sexy, body-positive Silhouette Challenge.
• Clubhouse brings online dinner party-style chats.
• 2021 boom in Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT), crypto art record sales.
• Tomorrowland virtual festival set a new standard for digital events.
• Roblox’ IPO and video game boom.

3 – Creative disruption: “The pandemic scarred us, but we will grow stronger out of it. We recreate small committee quality events. A hobby marketplace develops. There is a continuity between physical and virtual, and it goes both ways. We explore new ways of being together.”

Our social nature and our tech-savviness make us adaptable and resilient under hard circumstances. We embrace different kinds of social interaction. We still enjoy “tech-free bubbles” and favor human touch. We reopen our homes.

We have discovered new ways to enjoy entertainment – arts galleries instead of big museums, small gatherings instead of large concerts. We enjoy intellectual, cultural, business, and creative conversations in small audiences and respectful settings. We also take an active part in cultural production. We give classes about hobbies and consume from others. A hobby marketplace based on mutual sharing of skills emerges.

Signals:

• During a funeral over zoom, despite missing the human touch, participants appreciate the possibility to convey participants from all over the world and make it a creative moment with a talent show and live emotions.
• French art galleries have seen record numbers of visitors end of 2020.
• Board game market gained 20% in 2020.
• Children invent versions of Among Us “IRL” extending online gaming to real life gaming.
• Clubhouse grew from 600,000 users in December 2020 to over six million in February 2021.

The objectives of foresight and futurism are to help us prepare for these plausible futures and to seize opportunity within these worlds. These scenarios might happen at different time scales (short-term reaction, mid-term innovation, long-term foresight vision) in different areas of the world. As vaccination is moving along, some countries are showing great signs of openness and physical social revival such as Israel, while others are in between reopening and closing again such as France and Germany, and others seemed to go through a slow but steady recovery process such as the U.S.A.

The post Leisuring from Home: The Future of Social Life, Entertainment, and Culture? first appeared on Ludogogy.

As someone who has struggled with mental health issues for over a decade, I’d never really found an effective coping mechanism until I found mini painting and wargaming. Video games felt like a waste of time, TV the same and it was impossible to find the energy to actually leave the house. The feeling I get when I nail a new technique I’ve tried out or I’ve completed the centrepiece model of my army is second to none. The concentration required is absolute and it leaves no space for intrusive thoughts.  The work doesn’t feel like a waste of time, it gives a tangible thing to show to others and say, “I did this!” which in turn is motivation to leave the house. The sense of pride when someone compliments your models is always an amazing feeling.

The actual wargaming itself is exhausting, but in a good way. My brain is focusing on the strategies I’ve come up with, trying to execute them efficiently, adapting my plans when the dice gods laugh at me. A close, back and forth game is exciting for both players as these games are often decided by the ability to adapt, and which is a skill that has been immeasurably valuable in staying mentally healthy in the world we live in today. The versatility is also a skill which transfers to the workplace in aspects such as experimental design and process optimisation as all of these tasks rely on the ability to correctly identify issues in the systems used.

There is a strong sense of community in wargaming as well. I’ve seen an ex-military person playing a 10-year-old and both players having a great experience, I’ve been to 24 hour fundraisers for mental health, I’ve met people from all walks of life all with different motivations and drives in life, but all of who have realised the simple pleasure the escapism of strategy brings. A day of duking it out with strangers and making friends in the process is cathartic.

I’d implore anyone to give wargaming a go, as the benefits can be plentiful. I know that companies like Games Workshop have facilities to play trial games in store and allow you to get hooked started on painting with trial models. Many clubs around the country will also have players excited about new games and be willing to run demo games of systems they’re passionate about. There’s plenty of variety in themes as well. So, whether you favour the dystopian sci-fi settings of Warhammer 40k or Star Wars Legion, small scale historical skirmishes in games like Bolt Action and Test of Honour or even just the violent fantasy football of the Blood Bowl universe, you’ll find your flavour of combat-based escapism here somewhere.

The post The Personal Benefits of Wargaming first appeared on Ludogogy.

Challenge implies a battle, a struggle, a competition, striving or proving yourself, not that these are necessarily negative but just exhausting at a time when we are all exhausted anyway. So when someone suggested I run a lockdown Lego challenge I had to take a step back.

What would that look like? How can we reframe ‘challenge’?

So I decided not to ask people to join me in a Lego challenge but to join me in taking some time for themselves and see it as an opportunity to build on wellbeing, to experience something different and see how it can open up new thoughts and ideas about personal wellbeing.

With that in mind, participants were invited to look out some Lego, set aside some time to understand themselves a little more and how positive psychology, Lego and coaching can change how you view your wellbeing.

This led to a week of ‘Building Wellbeing’ online that allowed participants to explore their own current wellbeing in a unique way that combined Positive Psychology Coaching questions with Lego Serious Play. This was in response to how Covid-19 was affecting wellbeing and that all face to face workshops and coaching weren’t taking place.

Was it possible to build wellbeing using the online space?

Well-being itself is build-able. It isn’t just about the absence of negative functions such as depression, loneliness and illness but about the presence of positive attributes (such as happiness, connection and wellness) that make a person’s life fulfilling. It is about being able to thrive, as well as healing pathology.

In order to allow people to focus on their wellbeing building opportunities were developed based around Martin Seligman’s PERMA Model of Wellbeing. Seligman states Positive Psychology is about the concept of well-being, which he defines using 5 pillars. These 5 elements can help people reach a life of fulfilment, happiness and meaning. They are:

P – Positive Emotions

E – Engagement

R – Relationships

M – Meaning

A – Accomplishment

More recently, Health has been added as a 6th pillar of well-being as eating well, good sleep and enough exercise are all essential to both our physical and mental health. Health is the corner stone the other pillars rely on. When we pay deliberate attention to these interrelated areas of well-being and take positive action towards them we have the potential to improve individual, organisational and community well-being.

During the Building Wellbeing week, held on LinkedIn, each building opportunity presented enabled participants to focus on one of these aspects of wellbeing. To illustrate, the first aspect of wellbeing to reflect on was Positive Emotions.

Before, starting the activity it was useful for participants to familiarise themselves with Lego especially if they hadn’t used it for a while. Getting used to how the bricks fit together and thinking about how you could use the Lego to represent your thoughts helped prepare for the coaching question.

Giving themselves time to think whilst building was an integral part of the building opportunity.  There were no rules, no expectations. No one to judge the models, no competition. Participants could use as many or as few bricks as needed. There was no right or wrong answer.

The Positive Emotions activity was to:

“Build a model that reflects what you hope your life will look like look when you are no longer in lockdown.” Give yourself 20 minutes to complete this task.

Participants were asked to keep their models or take a photo for all the building opportunities during the week and post a photo and any comments/questions they had.

Here is a sample of the insights that participants discovered.

“We have full control to choose whether we walk through the door to a new way and my hope is to walk straight through and enjoy more of the good life, love, beauty, variety and our natural world.”

“Here is my ‘Hope’ model. I’m probably unlike a lot of people in that I’m (really really) enjoying lockdown. There’s such a lot of it that is already good, primarily the vast reduction in road traffic and having more time with my family.  A lot of wanting that to remain is tied up in the model – represented by the prevalence of green.”

Positive emotions are represented by feelings such as hope, joy, optimism and gratitude. Focusing on this area of well-being by broadening our experiences means we are more likely to try new things, step out of our comfort zones and engage with other people, enabling us to learn and grow. This in turn allows us to build lasting emotional resources. Focusing on positive emotions puts us on an upward spiral of being more positive and doing and learning more, increasing our levels of well-being. Exploring hope through the building of a Lego model gives participants the time to create new awareness and insights into a hopeful future in a safe environment, enabling them to set realistic and intrinsically motivating goals.

Participants were invited to further building opportunities on the remaining 5 pillars of wellbeing. Such wonderful moments were shared, some deep reflections and a feeling of connection, just some of the feedback on how using Lego influences coaching conversations even when carried out as online building opportunities with conversations, connections and experiences just shared on an online platform.

“I found that I was able to really connect to the topic I was building about, on a more emotional level than perhaps I normally would, which was interesting. Also as you can ‘rebuild’ any part of it of the model, the process felt more organic and natural, rather than saying something to a coach, then having to say, “oh what I meant was…”.

The post Building Wellbeing, One Brick at a Time first appeared on Ludogogy.