Designing Tenacity
Mike Beall, John Binzak, Craig Anderson, Lauren Wielgus, David Azari, Jennifer Dalson, Kurt Squire, Constance Steinkuehler
The Tenacity project is a collaboration between meditation experts and neuroscientists at the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds (Richard Davidson, Director) and game designers and learning scientists at the Games+Learning+Society Center (Constance Steinkuehler and Kurt Squire, Directors). Our goal was to facilitate and support the practice of mindfulness through a digital application and ultimately research the behavioral and neural effects. The nature of this interdisciplinary work is exciting and groundbreaking, but creating an engaging experience that stays true to the practice of meditation comes with its own challenges. Unlike most games and digital applications, the goal of meditation is not easily mapped to standard “win” states common to games. Practicing mindfulness is, in a way, somewhat orthogonal to the idea of earning a high score, beating a boss monster, or obtaining some rare drop. Rather, the goal here is to let go of the win state itself and instead become more self-aware and thus master not the game system but your own mind. Standard design elements that make a game engaging were, over repeated iteration in this project, reined in or stripped out entirely so as to stay true to the main “verb” within the game – self-regulation of one’s attention rather than seduction by a well-designed and “sticky” digital stimulus. Once our builds reached the hands of our adolescent participants, however, engagement was sorely lacking. Even when we reframed the builds as “gamified apps” with an achievement system but no core game mechanics per se, our target audience of teen- and tween-agers wanted something more recognizable, engaging, and sticky. In this Worked Example, we discuss our game design and redesigns in terms of telemetry data extracted from kleenex tests and a two-week experimental trial, the questions and conclusions we have now about this effort, and how we’ve shifted not only graphics and game mechanics but core audience.
