Shadows Edge game helps you build resilience through journaling and art

In Series 2 Episode 3 of the Health Points podcast Ben and Pete introduce Kevyn Eva, the co-creator of Shadows Edge, a mobile game that helps teenagers and young adults build resilience through journaling and art. Kevyn explains that Shadows Edge was created to address the emotional support lacking in childhood cancer treatment. The game allows players to express their emotions and connect with others facing similar challenges. It incorporates narrative therapy, where players search for pages of a lost book while answering personal questions about their dreams and exploring their emotions. Through writing and using art tools, players bring color back into the city within the game as a metaphor for reviving life. The team decided on these elements based on Sherry Sobrato Brisson’s background in writing therapy and feedback from teenage players during research studies. Players feel comfortable expressing themselves through the app because it provides an anonymous space without judgment or opinions from others.

You can listen to this episode below:

Episode summary:

We discuss the success of this game among young adults, particularly those aged 24 to 34. The game appeals to young people looking for a distraction and has good graphics. Privacy is a concern, but research is conducted using anonymized and aggregated data from players. The game shows positive results in terms of mental health improvement, as indicated by AI analysis and clinical trials.
The Digging Deep project includes the Shadows Edge game, a journal, and a guide to self-awareness aimed at working with social workers, educators, and psychologists.
Dopavision works on reducing myopia progression through light-based treatment administered twice daily for six months. Designing an engaging experience for children between six and 14 years old poses challenges regarding context, motivation, content preferences (such as minigames or videos), and duration of engagement. Minecraft, Roblox, Animal Crossing are mentioned as games that have successfully created long-term engagement through user creation capabilities.
The design of each minigame in the game was co-created with users and created by Dopavision and a studio in Vienna. The games were tested with kids, who showed a preference for avatars and personalization. The games are designed to keep players engaged for ten minutes and include activities like fishing and treasure hunting. The ideas for the game may have come from workshops with young people, but Mipumi is responsible for designing the games.
In terms of health gamification, it’s important to focus on transformation and understand the motivation behind playing. Mandating gameplay can create resistance, so allowing choice is crucial. There is potential for learning applications in health, such as virtual training for medical professionals. Some believe that certain games have inherent health benefits, while others aim to make therapeutic experiences enjoyable through gamification. Both approaches can learn from each other. Voluntary engagement is key to creating a true game experience. Shadow’s Edge was created out of a need for emotional support following treatment, demonstrating the value of gamification in supporting emotional recovery and wellness alongside traditional interventions.

Episode Transcript:

Ben
Hey everyone, and welcome back to another episode of Health Points, where we talk about anything and everything, gamification and health. I’m Ben and here with me today is my co host, Pete.

Pete
Hi everyone.

Ben
Joining us today is Kevyn Eva, who is co creator of the award winning mobile game Shadows Edge for teenagers and young adults to build resilience through journaling and art. She leads the product design and academic research for Shadows Edge digging deep project, and during her career she’s looked five years into the future with the Atos scientific community. And at Microsoft, she led the new World of Work initiative in Switzerland. Kevyn is consulting with the digital health startup Dopavision, which is implementing gaming to reduce the progress of high progression myopia. In addition to working on an app to support mums with knowledge and encouragement to make feeding their babies more fun, she holds a master’s in media innovation and has a humanistic background in languages and literature, in addition to mentoring students in South America and Switzerland.

Ben
Kevyn, it’s fantastic to invite you onto the show today.

Kevyn
Thanks for having me. Glad to be here.

Ben
Right, let’s get into it. I mean, Shadows Eggs has won so many awards, it would be wonderful for you to give a bit of a background into how Shadows edge came to be and what it delivers as a gamified service.

Kevyn
So the history of Shadows Edge is that the founder of the project, Sherry Sobrato Britson herself had a concrete need based on her history with childhood cancer, and which is that during the treatment she was healed and got very good physiological support, but the emotional support was actually lacking. She worked a lot with, after being healed, she worked a lot with young people in hospitals and saw that actually, even 20 years later, it’s the emotional side of illness, being able to speak about the dark things. Also your fears, your concerns that often you keep inside because you don’t want to burden your family, that there’s still a big need out there to create safe spaces, to get in touch with your emotions, with all your emotions, the so called good ones like happiness, joy, and also the difficult ones like anger, frustration, despair.

Kevyn
And to create a space where that is welcome and where you can meet others with the same challenges. And to make that also in a way that’s engaging. And that actually gets young people to write, who write a lot on WhatsApp, on text. Young people write a lot these days, but they typically don’t journal. And so the design question was, how can we create a space for young people that allows them to express all their emotions, get in touch with all their emotions, and that they want to engage with over a longer period of time.

Ben
And so what would that look like as an interaction with Shadow’s edge?

Kevyn
From a user’s perspective, the interaction is you land in a city, the city of Shadow’s edge. It’s a sunny day, and you actually very quickly meet Shadow. And Shadow is the villain. He’s bringing an incredible storm onto the city, and the city is being devastated. And the Guardians. Actually, the Guardians are. There’s only three guardians that then when you flee into an elevator, and when you come out of the elevator, the city is dark. Everything is disrupted upside down. And actually, you meet the Guardians to get the mission of finding the pages of the Book of Wisdom so that you can help bring the families back. And so the interaction in the game is you look for the pages of the lost book.

Kevyn
You find these pages, you get questions at the beginning, very easy questions, and then more personal questions the more you go along. And also more exploratory questions about where are you heading? What are your dreams? It’s a narrative based therapy journey. And every time you write, you receive art tools. And with these art tools, you can bring color back into the city. So the city is all dark, and then you can bring color to the walls to make the city your own. And that’s the metaphor in the game, to actually revive and bring life back.

Ben
Some really powerful game mechanics. You’ve added it in with Shadows edge. What was the process that you went through as a team to decide that these were the elements you wanted to implement? And they were from whatever reason or evidence or understanding that they were the most powerful ones to be implementing into Shadow’s edge.

Kevyn
The choice for narrative therapy was based on Sherry’s background. So for her writing and discovering the healing power of writing, that was the premise. She had already published a journal book, the Digging Deep Journal, which she distributed to hospitals, which also was a journal where you could write and draw and had different tasks around exploring your emotions. So narrative therapy was a given. Then we evaluated together with Rosie, also the producer, who herself is a fierce gamer. And so while were exploring how to bring the book into the digital world, it was okay. So narrative therapy is a given if you want to engage with teens on their mobile phones, because when you’re dealing with a serious illness, mobile is important because you spend a lot of time on the road between hospital visits, between clinic visits. So mobile was a given.

Kevyn
And then we evaluated like, we looked for serious gaming studios, and little chicken came into the picture, and they brought this metaphor on how about you have this metaphor of something shattered where you can bring back life? And in the beginning, it was more about bringing back into more like a fairy tale landscape in bringing back organic life. And then it turned more into, since we have a lot of kids in the urban areas, and also illness can be messy in a way. And so graffiti, as a metaphor came up to know. Graffiti is you put something on the wall and then you can paint over it and it can evolve as you move. So we had a vision workshop in the Netherlands, actually, with Sherry, with Rosie, with some teens with little chicken, and that’s where this concept was born.

Pete
So I’m really interested to add in there, is it a group game then? Are they seeing just their own graffiti and then going over it and replacing it? Or are they able to work with other people’s thoughts?

Kevyn
It’s their choice. So at the first part, it’s a personal game until you’re familiar with the mechanics, so that you can practice the art tools, the graffiti tools, and then in the second level, when actually in the first level, everything’s dark and disrupted. The more you paint, the more you write, then you get into the second level, sunlight comes through, but there’s still, like, the dust is settling, it’s still pretty gray, but there’s flowers starting to grow. That’s also where one of the Guardians hands you a mobile phone in the game that allows you to connect with others and that allows you to publish your art to the in game Shadowgram, like the in game Instagram Shadowgram. And there you can publish your art.

Kevyn
You can see the art from others, you can give each other encouragement, and then you also get a quest to discover the community gallery where you see actually, you know, oh, there’s other players in this world, and then there’s a basic way to create art with others on the shared community wall. And when we move forward, it’s a direction to explore further this creating with each other. But at the moment, Shadowgram is used a lot, and I think it’s also important many young people appreciate the personal aspect of it, the personal space that you have, a space where you don’t need to worry about anyone else, you don’t need to write for anyone else. No one’s going to see it. You write for yourself. Also the art, it’s for yourself. You can put out there what you want.

Kevyn
It’s not about being good, it’s not about expressing anything anybody else can understand. It’s about just getting things out. And if you choose, yes, you can publish.

Pete
Thanks that makes a lot of sense.

Ben
I have a few more exploration of questions here. So I’m currently reading a book called everybody lies by Seth Stevens Davidsovitz, who looks about data and information put into Google. And ultimately that people are willing to be open with Google or a digital device in a way they wouldn’t with other humans. Do you have that feedback from the adolescent and teenage players they feel comfortable expressing and open up to a digital device, to an app that they wouldn’t have done to, say, a family member, a friend, or even a human therapist? And to extend from that one, where does all this information go? Is it under lock and key and it’s just for the individual to have access to? Or are you looking at that data to look at data analysis and patterns as well?

Kevyn
Both. So the evidence that we have from the teens, it’s something that we did a lot of then research and also video interviews. We did player observations. And one story that touched me very much was a young woman whose father had committed suicide. And she actually said, being able to talk about this and also being able to express the shame, the guilt, interestingly, that she was feeling helped her process this. And she had an interesting journey with us because she then also decided that she wanted to publish. And so we found ways that she could tell her story because that’s also part of the narrative therapy thing. You tell the story to yourself. The more you tell it to yourself, you practice telling it to others. Every time you tell your story, you gain a new perspective.

Kevyn
And these new perspectives create that kind of internal mobility that can get you unstuck. Other players, one player with a long term chronic illness and having. Going through bouts of pain and strong pain and being chronically confronted with pain or with any chronic condition can be challenging because it really can wear you down. And she goes into the game to actually just find the Guardian and then just have the guardian conversations, which are canned conversations. And I asked her, but I mean, it’s like these conversations, you’ve done them before and they’re canned. What is it that touches you? And then she feels, no. It’s like, because the Guardians have also. They’re dealing with a big catastrophe. They’re dealing with this disruption of their city, with their families being gone. They don’t have the solution.

Kevyn
And that’s actually a pivot that we made during the development of the game, that the Guardians don’t have the solution. The Guardians are there looking for a solution with you. They know the mechanics of the world. They know the tools that you can find but interestingly, just talking to a digital character in a canned conversation was soothing for her. And so there’s something in this anonymity, I think. Have you ever talked to strangers? Like something’s really on your mind and then you’ve told this story to a stranger? I think it’s something, maybe the digital world, it’s like the same in a way. You can talk to a stranger because you don’t need to worry about any judgment, any opinions, any role. As soon as we’re in a relationship with someone, we take on a role. That’s that.

Kevyn
I do think the digital space offers challenges, but also these opportunities, which are wonderful, that allow us to get to know ourselves better by not interacting with someone else, but by interacting with this abstract digital thing.

Pete
I think you’ve caught on to something really important there as well, because the Guardians are validating their emotions, which feels really good. But also from the other perspective, it’s really hard to build a solution for lots of different people with lots of different issues. I think you made your life easier for yourself as well by accident, by doing that.

Kevyn
Yeah. And you’re bringing a really good point. I mean, the biggest challenge of our project is our dna is in dealing with trauma, the trauma of a serious or chronic illness, and then getting into hospitals, into doctors. It’s a very long process. So we have a clinical trial that actually shows how the game really helps with identity exploration and defining your new identity after having survived cancer. And at the same time we realized, wow, there’s so many young people confronting of mental issues at the moment. So we pivoted and said, okay, let’s go broad. Let’s be something for everyone. And that doesn’t work. Wanting to be something for everyone, for every youth is too broad. Actually, we’re narrowing back, and it seems to be that the sweet spot for the game is for young people at a risk of depression.

Kevyn
So we have some preliminary pilot study data with the University of Zurich led under the children’s hospital chief psychologist. And that actually said, if you’re at the risk of developing a clinical depression, there’s like this PHQ nine cut off that you reach when you do these surveys. And actually playing the game got the kids back under that cut off value. And so now we’re really focusing on young people that have faced difficult things or that are facing difficult things. It can be childhood trauma, it can be adverse life situations and who are feeling down, who are feeling that sadness and feeling hopeless actually is kind of sticking around very long for them. That’s our niche. And the game is bringing really good results to kids and young adults. Our players are older than we thought. They’re up to 24, 25, up to 34.

Kevyn
And it’s those young people that have a need to process. They love the game. They really love the game. Young people who are looking for a distraction, who are just browsing the App Store and think, oh, this looks cool, because the graphics are really nice. They actually. Then they drop off. And so it’s one of the key learnings is find that niche and stick with that niche and then expand from there to the next niche that really wants you. And, yeah, you had another question around data. So when signing up for the game, there’s the big disclaimer, of course, privacy. Also, we’re partially based in Europe, so privacy is a big concern. And the young people, they actually do allow us to do research with data on anonymized and aggregated basis.

Kevyn
So we can extract all the writing and all the art from the game, but only in a pool. And we do that. And that’s also where we learned that what kind of issues, actually our players are facing, because you see it in the writing, and also that the sweet spot of the game is for young people facing serious stuff, which doesn’t make it easier to market.

Ben
What are you seeing in terms of the changing in people’s life? Is it anecdotal feedback that you’re receiving or with the research you’re conducting? Are you using validated outcome measures to track change as well?

Kevyn
So when we do the research, we’re more doing. We used AI, like semantic analysis and sentiment analysis. So we ran AI tools to understand what are people dealing with. And then we have these studies. So there’s the clinical trial at was the. There’s the pilot study at University of Zurich, and now there’s a study in Colombia, because we received a grant to work with young kids in Colombia in adverse life situations. And that study is ongoing at the moment. And they’re using. So the current study is using the WHO five index for well being. That’s like, it’s a global measure around youth well being. They’re also using the PHQ nine for depression, and they’re using a resilience scale to understand resilience and resilient coping.

Kevyn
Because the preliminary research that we did in Colombia to understand the mental health situation there showed that avoiding and actually just not dealing with situations is the preferred way of coping, because there’s huge stigma around mental health there. We have these formal measures, and it’s one of the next steps that we would like to do is add a version, a consumerized version of the depression scale to the beginning of the game so that players can actually see their progress themselves. But at the moment, the clinical, let’s say clinical measures are being used by our research partners.

Ben
Thank you so much about talking about shadows edge. It’d be great to know what the digging deep project is now and how it extends beyond or within Shadow’s edge.

Kevyn
So digging deep project is the publisher of the Digging Deep journal. That was kind of the origin of this project. Then came Shadow’s Edge as sort of the flagship project, now going digital, being mobile. And additionally, we created now this actually Shadows Edge guide to self awareness, the Shadows Edge Guide to Self Awareness, which is a companion product to the Shadows Edge game and also shows we want to work more with social workers, educators and psychologists. So we’re now focusing on creating the tools to embed the game and the workbook into the work that adults do with young people. So the digging deep project is the container for all this.

Pete
So I’m interested here because so many people build a gamified health app or product or game aimed at, say, just the kids, and some will just build a tool to help people who are working with them. Why both? What do you think is going to be most important or most useful?

Kevyn
Yeah, why both? So at first, went the consumer route. Let’s say our ambition was to build a game that kids would discover and find and love through the health care channels, but also in the App Stores. Being a game that kids spread virally, they talk about each other, they send it to each other, and they send each other to the App Stores is really hard. And also mental health apps, there’s a lot of conversation between the young people about mental health. They actually build these interesting support networks among each other. And still in Shadows Edge, the people that are in our community and that we engaged with more, they all don’t know each other. So Shadow’s Edge is not a place where you bring your friend. It’s a shadow’s edge. It’s a place where you can be yourself, potentially in a different way.

Kevyn
We also have a lot of players who are exploring their identities and trying on different identities. And so you can be in this space and it’s yours. So getting the game to go viral didn’t work. What we see is in the studies, the engagement is super high and also super rich. So they’re looking. Actually, the study partners send us also the aggregated data. Then you see this correlation between how much they engage in the game and the kind of things they’re processing, which you see. Oh, wow, that’s really valuable. And then there’s. Our current hypothesis is actually the kids appreciate being in a context, having a social worker or an adult, knowing that there is this context where it is about processing things. It’s play, but it’s serious. It’s about connecting to places in me that I normally don’t.

Kevyn
And that’s why we’re now, based on the results that we’re seeing, we want to create this support to the adults, to develop new bridges and new ways to communicate and to go through the process of therapy or learning in new ways.

Ben
In that case, what would be great now, Kevyn, is to talk about something you’re new, that you’re working on in terms of with Dopa vision, how do they get involved with it? And if we could talk through how gaming is being used to look at reducing the progressing myopia, again, working with adolescents and teenagers, again, that would be fantastic.

Kevyn
Yes. So Dopa vision is working with kids from six to 1314 years old. And what’s really interesting about this project is that there’s a physiological change that. So whereas with Shadow’s edge, it’s a personal, emotional, psychological journey and transformation, with Dopa vision, it’s a physiological change that is the goal of this project, which is changing the growth of the eyeball. There’s a different way the eyeball can grow, and one of them actually leads to progressive myopia. And so the basis of that treatment, it’s a light based treatment. On the website, they explain the clinical basis of this. And to administer this light based treatment, the children actually need to do that very regularly. So they need to do that once or twice a day. And that’s the design challenge here.

Kevyn
What can we create so that a young kid between six and 14 wants to engage with this experience every day for ten or 20 minutes? It’s yet to be decided what the dosage is regularly, without creating friction in the family, without dropping off, without refusing to do the treatment. And that’s a real big challenge. I got involved in the project through, like, they contacted me via LinkedIn. So that was an interesting one. And they asked me actually, around how to engage with young people during the process. So we’ve been setting up play tests with very early prototypes. And what I think is key, actually, to good design is understanding the context, is understanding the motivations, is understanding the reality of these kids. And so it’s very different to have a six year old than a 13 year old.

Kevyn
So that’s one thing that’s a huge challenge in this project. Who do we design for? Is there experience that works for all, or do there actually have to be variations of the experience and then understanding? So, for example, when in the day can this actually happen, this session? Ideally, it would happen in the morning and in the evening. In the morning and in the afternoon. And now we’re seeing. Actually, afternoon is tricky because kids these days are busy. Like, in the afternoon, they have sports, they have music, they’re full of activities. And so understanding that context is key. And then understanding, okay, what do they think is fun? What do they love doing? What kind of content do they want to engage with? And so minigames are very high up in the role.

Kevyn
And also, one question that we’re asking them is, actually, if you could invest your time for a year, what do you actually want to get really good at? Because that’s potentially. So we have the option, they can play minigames, but if they get bored of the minigames, they can also watch videos. And so what kind of videos? What content do you provide? And then it’s the question, actually, what do you want to watch every day? Who do you like on TikTok? Who do you like on YouTube? And what is it? Is it space that you’re really fascinated with? Or we’re asking, actually, what are you fascinated with? What do you want to dive deep into to make this worth their time?

Pete
I think you’ve got some really interesting challenges there. So ten to 20 minutes, twice a day is a long period of time. So are they able to do other things during that? So that’s what I’m reading between the lines. And also, how long do you need them to do it for the engagement you need, is it years? You were just talking about a year there.

Kevyn
Yes. The current clinical trial is a year. Yeah, it’s actually half a year. It’s half a year. And then there’s a control group or something. But it’s like, the current running clinical trial is parents and kids sign up for six months.

Pete
Yeah. I’m kind of interested to know if it’s, like one sequence or they need to rerun it every year until the eye is fully developing.

Kevyn
It’s all under research, actually, at the moment. So the exact protocol for this treatment is being designed, but it takes consistency. It takes daily interaction. They’re also finding out now how much leaving the game can still be okay. And it’s a huge challenge, though, because then when you ask kids what have you been playing for the last two, three years? They have, actually. I’m so surprised at the loyalty kids have to. Amazing. It’s amazing. But so what are these games? It’s Minecraft, it’s Roblox, it’s subway surfers Fortnite. Yeah, so those are call of Duty. There’s like these AAA games that really made it to create engagement. I think Minecraft and Roblox, it’s because you are creating your world.

Kevyn
And so there’s this open world thing that the game develops with you and you can drive it forward, and there’s so much richness in the experience that’s.

Pete
Really interesting, isn’t it? So for that long term engagement, the more they create, the more they take ownership of it, and the more they want to keep using it.

Kevyn
And so in the current core loop, also, there’s this aspect of that the more you play, the more you generate. You can create your avatar, and you can create more gear for your avatar. And then the challenge is actually. And so, okay, and so now what can that avatar actually do?

Kevyn
Or what can that avatar, how does that then create this reengagement loop so that the avatar actually becomes meaningful, so that you can either show it to others or that one game I really love is actually is Animal Crossing, because it’s very well implemented that you have this core loop between you discover the world, and then you start building something, and then the more you build something, the more options and the more tools you get to build more, and the more the world opens, so the more areas in the world you discover, but also the more you can shape that world to look just like your world. I don’t know if you’ve ever looked at Animal Crossing worlds. It’s amazing what they build. It’s like in Minecraft. It’s incredible what people build when they’re given the tools.

Kevyn
But of course, creating animal crossing or creating a minecraft or creating a roblox, that didn’t happen in a year or two. These are like multi year development projects that grew over what would be great.

Ben
Kevyn, is I’m really interested in the, like, how different are they? And where did the design of each minigame come from? Was it co created with your players, with your users? Or where was the insight that created each of these individual minigames?

Kevyn
So you’d have to speak with the product manager at Dopavision. They’re working together with a studio in Vienna, and they created the concept for the game that has. It’s got a narrative container, and then there’s these minigames that have something to do with the world that you’re in, and they’re more like the first game that they created was a simple matching game. Like, you had to identify a figure, and then it would show you other figures, and you would have to click every time there’s a match. And it was like a reaction game. So your goal was to get as quick as possible into matching. Then they tested that with kids and actually saw, okay, kids really do love avatars. They love personalization of avatars, and they love story.

Kevyn
And so then the context for the minigames was created, like this meta layer, and then the games originated out of that story. So there’s a fishing game, there’s a treasure hunt game, and they’re very easy to use because it’s about keeping you engaged for ten minutes. Then there’s the break scene, which is about the narrative. And then you go back into the other minigames, and they’re designed around that. There’s a mechanic that allows you to solve this mini puzzle. Where’s the treasure? How do I get the fish? And then you get the reward of having that success and having more success so that you can get more crafting materials to then be able to work with your avatar. And so the ideas of the game, I actually don’t know if they came from workshops with young people.

Kevyn
We definitely tested them with young people to then say, okay, based on this ones, which ones do you like? What kind would you like further? And then Mipumi actually comes up with the designs.

Ben
Wonderful. It’d be great. Now, Kevyn, to kind of explore your future thinking and kind of wisdom in gamification over the years. Where do you think health gamification is going? What do you think some of the most important things on the horizon for people working in health gamification?

Kevyn
I think it’s at the core, I believe that Shadow’s edge hit a nerve. Shadow’s edge is not like it hasn’t touched millions of players yet, but it has touched some players really deeply. And that is because at the core, there was the idea and the understanding of that condition. So Sherry, the founder, really, she knew what she was talking about there. She knew the impact of narrative therapy. And I think that’s so important that gamification. I hear so many people say, just add some points, add a leaderboard, and then off we go. And it’s this really understanding the transformation that’s at the core and designing around that. And then, yes, talking about enjoyment and fun and learning and progression and creating core loops that are engaging. That is then the design challenge.

Kevyn
But it’s like at the core, it’s about a transformation, it’s about a health gain. It’s about something personal. That’s the motivation, that’s the driver. And the game is supporting that. It’s understanding that motivation also with the kids at Dopavision, I think their motivation to actually do something for their eyes is super high. And really understanding this motivation and understanding the challenges and also understanding why sometimes, even though you know something’s good for you’ll do the opposite. Humans are funny beings because that’s what they’ll do if they’re mandated to play something. You need to be really careful to make the choice for the kids to play their choice, because if you mandate it, you’ll get into the. I’ve seen that from other projects.

Kevyn
It’s like if you mandate the gameplay, you get into the resistance, because then it’s about all of a sudden it becomes about parent child dynamic and power dynamic. And it’s not anymore about, okay, I want to get better. I need to get better. And just putting that in the center of the design process and not saying, okay, let’s gamify, and we’ll gamify, and then they’ll come. I think that’s an important one. And I do think there’s a lot of potential in the area also for learning in health. I mean, all the training applications, the virtual training applications for nurses or for doctors, for surgeons, there’s a huge potential that’s untapped. I’m also interested. There’s companies like playwell. Maybe you want to talk with them. They take the other route. They say there are games that in themselves can be healing.

Kevyn
And there’s a whole list of games, for example, that are known to support young people or also old people with ADHD to help them focus. And just because of the mechanics that are in those games, or like Animal Crossing, I actually got into playing it because there’s a lot of research around the psychological benefits of playing Animal Crossing. And so there’s these two approaches, those that are creating games and saying, this game and this game mechanic inherently has a health benefit. And then there’s the other option, like dopamision is such a good example. There’s a therapy, there’s the light that needs to be administered, and then let’s make that experience enjoyable. And that’s why we end up in games. And I think both areas are fascinating and can extremely learn from each other.

Kevyn
But yeah, I love being in this field because it’s projects that are worthwhile.

Pete
They are like, yeah, that’s fantastic. I love the quote about finding the transformative bit and building around that. I think that’s the critical bit I want from this whole podcast for everyone to know about gamification.

Ben
I’d also add, one of the things that was highlighted just then by Kevyn is this importance of voluntary pet play. That without that, it’s not a game. Voluntary engagement is a hugely important thing around interacting with games and play. Kevyn, it’s been fantastic having on the episode today to talk about shadows edge and how it was created out of a need and problem understanding and built out of a lack of emotional support for young people following treatment. And then also the importance of gamification to support of the emotional side of recovery and wellness. And that can go in conjunction with the pragmatic and practical side of traditional health intervention and treatment, and also the value and role of anonymous digital options that create that platform for adolescents, teenagers and adults to express emotions as part of their therapeutic journey.

Ben
It’s been brilliant having you on the show today, and we’d love to have you back at a future series.

Kevyn
Thank you so much. Great, and thanks for that summary. That was, like, interesting to hear.

Pete
Yeah, well, I feel like this episode has been a design masterclass for health gamification, and that’s exactly why we set up the podcast series. So thank you.

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