Pioneer

An Augmented Reality Game that Get's People Walking in Nature Habitually to Improve Mental Health

_Type
_{MHCI+D Ideation Studio project at the University of Washington in collaboration with Pop Cap Games with Emily Dobbins and Conor Kelly}

_{My Role}
_{Research, Synthesis, Sketching, Visual Design}

_Timeline
_{Oct - Dec 2016 (8 weeks)}

Goal

In collaboration with Pop Cap Games, we were tasked with creating a game or app that promotes a positive behavior change in a personal, social, or environmental way. Through extensive research, ideation, and refinement, our team created a high fidelity concept that accomplished this goal.

Process

Research

For our research process, we conducted secondary research on mental health, behavior change, and game design. We wanted to create a fun and engaging way of improving mental wellness. From what we learned, we created a design question.

Secondary Research

“Spending just 90 minutes in nature can improve your mental wellness.”

— Gregory N. Bratman, Nature experience reduces rumination and subgenual prefrontal cortex activation

_{To begin the research process, our team conducted extensive secondary research on frameworks, models, and best practices pertaining to behavior
change, game design, and mental health.}

Design Question

How might we promote long-term mental wellness by employing game design and behavior change?

Ideate

Once we had our design principles set, we conducted a variety of ideation techniques such as a brain dump, sketching, morphological synthesis, and storyboarding. These allowed us to converge our ideas into a final concept.

Brain Dump

_{To externalize some of our hiking and outdoor
knowledge, we created a visual Brain Dump to help
foster some ideas prior to concept sketching.}

Sketching

_{We conducted 3 timed sketching sessions and created 53 different concepts. Following our timed sketches, we then created a set of higher fidelity sketches to inspire further ideation.}

Morphological Synthesis

_{Morpha-what? Taking some of our favorite concepts into account, our team now had to converge these into a single unified concept. We conducted what's known as a morphological
synthesis to create meaningful themes from our most promising concepts. The result was 3 themes: communal narrative, skill building and mental wellness. This is an awesome technique for creating thematic groupings from a wide range of ideas.}

_{Now that we had a set of 3 themes to work with from our morphological synthesis, we had to translate those themes into specific behaviors that
we could incorporate into a single concept: Habitual Nature Seeking, Natural Immersion and Collaborative Play}

_{From the 3 behaviors, we then created a set of
core game mechanics to encourage behavior
change, and drive engaging gameplay. These core
mechanics were then incorporated into our final
game concept: Pioneer.}

Storyboard

_{To put Pioneer in it’s context of use, we created a storyboard to demonstrate how the game mechanics would address the 3 targeted behaviors. In the storyboard, Dave is motivated to walk in a nearby nature park by accepting a Gathering Quest on his phone. As soon as Dave reaches a nearby park, he starts to collect Grit and Resources by entering Gathering Mode via the wearable app. In this mode, Dave doesn’t have to look at a phone or wearable screen to the play the game, and is therefore being immersed in nature. When he leaves the park, Dave spends his collected Resources and Grit on his Faction’s Settlement, thereby participating in collaborative play.}

Refine

Once we decided on a final direction, we created an interaction flow, wireframes, and a final set of high fidelity mockups. The result was Pioneer, a frontier-themed augmented reality game that motivates nature seekers and people who want to improve their mental health to regularly walk in natural areas.

Interaction Flow

_{To understand the progression of the game, we developed an interaction flow to show how tutorials would fit into the main game. We used a circular flow to demonstrate the ongoing nature of the game.}

Wireframes

_{To makes sense of our game mechanics and ideas, we sketched a series of screens that represented the core functionality of Pioneer’s
gameplay.}

Final Mockups

_{Pioneer is a frontier-themed augmented reality game that motivates nature seekers and people who want to improve their mental health to regularly walk in natural areas.}

_{Pioneer seeks to get people walking in green spaces habitually, it encourages players to work together both digitally and in-person, and it teaches people to enjoy the benefits of full, undistracted immersion in natural areas.}

_{Grit + Resource Collection}
_{After earning enough Resources and Grit, players in the same faction can work together to fortify their settlements. Teamwork helps build a strong faction.}

_{Gathering Mode}
_{In this mode, the game will enter a passive state so that players can be immersed in nature while they collect Resources and Grit.}

_{Factions + Territory}
_{This is the map view of the game where players can see which factions control what territories nearby.}

_{We presented our concept to Pop Cap Games and other game professionals and received awesome feedback.}

Final Thoughts

Creating Pioneer was an awesome experience that allowed our team to explore creative ways of employing game design and behavior change tactics to create habits that promote positive health and well-being. Today, many companies often employ these tactics in detrimental ways that do not provide any real value to a person. As a designer, I think it's important to use behavior change and game design in ethically sound ways that actually benefit the individual, not just a company's bottom line or KPI.

Imagine the positive impact we could make if we all employed game design and behavior change tactics for good.

Pioneer | AR Game Concept to Improve Mental Health