How can Gaming Help in Times of COVID-19? PG Connects Digital #2

the inevitable COBIT 19 conversation and how can gaming help in these times we've got Rosemarie here from shadows edge where he's going to come and join me I think this is incredible kind of thing about what's happening games games isn't necessarily immune from you know the issues of world problems but it is a massively powerful tool for a scape for a mental health support and so on and so forth and I mean to see what originally thinks about all that so ROS we thank you for joining us and I will pass over to you oh you're on me there we go alright so I'm sharing my screen as well because I'm sharing a little bit of a presentation I hope that's yep that's

coming through perfect perfect let me just put those tools to decide a little bit there we go all right so yeah as you said it's an inevitable conversation right we weren't thinking actually when we started the game that that's what we would be using it for but here we are and so I'm here to talk a little bit about why I'm here Who I am what we've been doing with you know our game putting that in a serious context and then really show a little bit about what the game does so that I can then explain how we pivoted towards kovat as that start happening and then some lessons learned from that process because this was a very short notice thing that happened obviously the world went quickly and we had to just basically adapt which is that's me after the first couple of weeks of Kovach not that I had any virus but just because of the workload so I am I have a classical

training aggressive background in tech so anything from you know help desk to outsourcing etc in various small and large companies like Microsoft IBM etc until I decided to join a little startup that did gamify things like Urban development's and so city planning you know the topic smart city if somebody's heard that where you look at how can you make the cities of the future better for people and I believe you know the ladies before me mentioned some of the simple stuff with toothbrushes but there's a whole bunch more of course that you could game if I also in a city where you could simulate how a city runs and try to in the simulation already iron out all of the kinks and all of the mistakes that we do when we're building a city and so that part got me into gaming and then I was approached by a friend of mine who said look I have a self-help book and I would like you to join and so what I did first was I looked at her and I said okay with a self-help book if you want to do something that goes more digital I think

I would create a game and I was thinking of you know some of the things that you see here on this slide a lot of the games that actually have some meaning to it nowadays you know that are not just for entertainment that are trying to get messages across and so that's what I started doing I started looking into those and I came across some of these that are that are now quite well known I don't know if you anybody knows about concrete guinea for example they want to raise awareness about bullying so the game is a city where you go around and you actually work with a lot of tools of art and you go against bullies I hope is something that a company called Microsoft has made together with hope labs in the US and it is based on a principle of shooting your cancer so there you have to try and fight your cancer in a virtual world to empower you and then another one maybe to point out this mission 1.5 which is an environmental game where you can vote for your country's legislations and changes that you could make to actually

help save the earth and apart from that obviously there's like the mainstream games like you see here and we'll Warcraft or Zelda that also have seems integrated to raise awareness about certain topics like suicide or with world of warcraft on the left it's diabetes for example or loneliness or anxiety and that's just a trend that we see much more and so that's what we wanted to do with shadows edge with shadows edge the goal is to help people become more emotionally resilient so to build emotional strength and so what we did is we took the advice from psychologists we based the game on narrative therapy and looked you know what could we do what helps really if you have anxiety or depression specifically we were looking into people that have chronic illnesses that are seriously ill and that really have you know extreme hardships that they're going through and so we started working with both psychologists but also with

teens and young adults that actually had issues like cancer lyme disease diabetes amputations you name it like really serious stuff and looked at how can we make a tool that works as a digital therapeutic but also is fun and that's that's sort of worried and nailed down really we wanted to to go with gaming we hired a fantastic gaming studio because we're not a gaming studio we are a nonprofit organization and we want to bring free self-help content to young people that need it and so we hired a fantastic gaming studio in the Netherlands called the little chicken game company and they worked with us and we're really good with working with teens and with young adults in their studio to make all of this happen so what we did was really try to figure out how can we impact the emotional health of young people and to do that and now I'll talk a little bit about what the game actually is but to

do that we really designed from the start a study to look at what do people talk online about and when they have serious illnesses you know what what are they thinking about what is their stress what are they anxious about and then we built a survey together with the health department of the Dutch government and a university in the Netherlands that looked at how do you become more resilient and how do we measure that what is resilience and how do you measure that and there are seven factors of resilience that people can measure things like proactive coping optimism positive self-identity a more positive outlook on life all those things if you can if you can manage to have those that will make you stronger to face whatever comes your way and so we had seven of those factors and then we built a study around then where we had a baseline and an end survey and we had young players play for six weeks three times a week for twenty minutes and this is some of the outcomes that you see

there so we've got tons of google reviews and app app store reviews as well one of my favorite ones is where it will says yeah I think the shadows edge just helped me find out things about myself that I really didn't know I was capable of so I it made me stronger because I can face things better and we found that with the results people became more inspired more empathetic and also more connected and they were less afraid to be real and authentic and that's that's I think something that was really good for us specifically because in six weeks if you do that a lot its amount of time generally you get about halfway through the game so the more positive content is actually later in the game as you start leveling up so what is shadows edge well shadows edge is a tool where you it's a game where you enter city and the city's been hit by a storm and that's what it looks like on the left you can see everything sort of out of whack it's dark it's dreary and what you have to do is two things you have to find the pages of a missing

journal and answer the therapeutic questions are on that those are much like you would get in and around therapy or in a self-help book if you will their questions about self-esteem questions about life questions about what you're going through friendships all those types of stuff and those are all put onto mapped onto the psychological journey that you go through when something harsh happens to you in your life where at first you may feel like your life has been disrupted you may be angry about that gradually you know you start going into a phase that we call disillusionment where you think this is never gonna end and you know we Cove it we've all been there in the last couple of months and then you get more into discovery where you start to incorporate what's happened into your life and really see and look forward into what you're going through now and as we started as we started then testing more and we had a clinical study also with Lori's Children's Hospital we saw well it's not just for people with chronic illnesses there's actually a lot

of other people that were approaching us and said look I just feel anxious I'm totally stressed out can i play this game too and so we started adapting the content more generally taking away some of the medical questions and really putting that more into more content into our game that could apply to a broader audience and as Kovac hit in March suddenly we started seeing people that online and giving us review saying you know I'm really glad I found this game now because it's really it's a hard time I feel isolated we started seeing drawings and that's the second part I forgot about that sorry the second part that you do is precise journaling is you create graffiti and you make your city beautiful again by by arts that you can also share in the game with others and so we started see things popping up in the game and around the game with cocaine-related as you can see here you know people were drawing things related to kovat and sharing that in our community and we decided that we wanted to actually adhere to that the other

thing that we noticed was that people were coming back to us and saying you know what this game looks exactly like the real life with Kovac and so as you can see here this is the first phase in the game on the right which is disruption and on the left side obviously Las Vegas has been disrupted again here this is from the second phase which is disillusionment which is where there is in our game there's dust not snow settling on the situation of your life but you can see there's a lot of similarities with clothes shops empty streets everybody left because in shadows edge a storm hit and everybody left and you're basically there to save the city with your work on yourself and this thing is the last face we call discovery so again some very similar outlook as we have here in in real life nowadays and so we thought well if that is happening what we what can we do to help and so we reached out to again our partners that we have like starlight and others and said okay can you send some

people are wait and we started reaching out in the game in the in on boarding community and asking ok who wants us help to figure out how we can make this game more suitable for what's going on now in your world and so we came up with a bunch of extra features we we had additional missions put into the game that really related to the current situation in the game there is this tool we call shadow Graham which is an like an Instagram in the game and it's a community and basically you can take a picture of your world that you created not of the journal that's private but you can take a picture of the graffiti you create and then you can share that with other players in the game and that was really very basic and very much a push situation where other people could just see what you were doing and so with with kovat happening we saw that there is a much bigger need because of the isolation and the frustration that the teens had to really connect with others and so we've built our shadow grams you can see on the left we've built our

shadow gram further to really incorporate like challenges that they could do things that we asked them to draw about what's happening in the world and then post to others we also made sure that we had more rewards and more stickers and more more graffiti stuff that read they could use to to express their frustration of what they're going through we also set up like a social media calendar that was quite different so we really revamped all of all of our communication with the kids and as you can see on the right one of the missions that we have in there for example is to do a photo hunt where we ask people to do something very specific like here in this case it's imagining what Kobe would look like as a monster and then draw that and share that with others and so we also wanted to give people more of a way to give feedback within the game and to also comment on on things as well so apart from a development cycle which then run very quickly in Sprint's of like one week before we then published

additional features and then working with the teams directly to really make sure that we were implementing the things that they needed at that time we also work with psychologists to make missions and and challenges in the game that really would help people in the situation they were in and then we started seeing also that players from the game I mean we had to get quite an increase in downloads as well and so we saw a place from the game I'm also really connecting more with us in social media and asking us for more you know young people related content and so within the space of about six weeks not only did we redevelop our game a little bit but we also completely revamped our social media and how we how we handle the communication with teens outside of the game so we had a different type of look and feel but also be up to like quarantine Edition Q&A s where young people could ask us anything that they wanted we also worked with a partnership

organizations like lonely whale and and Starlight foundation to come up with with tips and tricks that we could do on the righthand useed for example that is a different format that's not for social media but that's actually a billboard that we can publish in the game so around the game we have these billboards set up now where we can give public information and we can advertise certain topics and on the bottom left here you see that we also started running free webinars for teens but also webinars for parents to really help them cope with specifically this dis situation and the unique thing I think because our game was built with psychologists for young people that have emotional stress anxiety in dire situations I think what made it really unique for us was that we were able to pivot that quite quickly because we had the psychologists already on board to really make sure that what we were doing is the right thing and was helping the teens so we started seeing really cool results so these are some of the things that the teens made in in the

in the game in shadow RAM and on the Left the two those are in response to our challenge of drawing Corona as a monster for example and we also saw more positive messages coming up again after you know a couple of weeks of really really doing this which we thought was really rewarding so what are the outcomes of this I mean we had basically from mid-march until about mid May it took us to two pivots to really turn things around as I said we did weekly sprints with an upload to the app stores on a weekly basis just releasing a few features at the time that really helped get a bond with the play as well we were able to confirm that young people do really want to express themselves and and there is a need for this kind of community where it's safe and where people feel they can express anything and where people specifically

young people of any kind can can join so we've seen an increase not only in downloads but we've also seen an increase in people that play quite quite younger longer and that want to help others that really come with encouraging messages and inspiring messages we've also seen that the importance to really stay current if you have a game to really stay with your audience and go where your audience goes and so we've we've gone pretty much through stages asking people in within the game on the billboards you know please vote what one of the kind of things you want to see here what are the challenges we've asked people you know to come up with missions we reran again Jam for young people to help us really come up with the content that they needed to know because it's all about them this is meant to be an emotional support tool for them for the players and so we really wanted to make sure that we continue to work with the players directly to make it for them we've also seen that it's more about the content we haven't changed the story of

the game with shadows edges being a city that's been hit by a storm because there's metaphors enough in there you know that that that fit with what the what the world is going through at the moment it's more about really making sure that the content that you do deliver is really what your players want and that requires a lot of communication with your players and that's what we've we've done a lot consequently our play time winds up which is great we really have people engage longer we started seeing people who play the game really all the way through and we've also seen that there's more writing and definitely more sharing with other people so people are now our players are now trying to share with others to keep things going to really make sure that others benefit from what they have to say and that there is an interest we've also had a lot of media interest because of what we're doing and we've seen that that makes absolutely no difference for our tools well we had a few more impressions every time we had an interview a TV interview or whatever it does enough

for the download and I think one of the things that we did at the beginning of the game is we really tried to push this game through psychologists through healthcare professionals and through parents and what we're seeing and what we're validating here I suppose in this in this time for us is it is a good learning that we need to talk to the teens directly into the young people that are playing our games and they're not going to accept a self-help tool if it comes pressured from for example their parents especially not when they're confined when they're frustrated anyways a lot of them are frustrated with their parents and that's something that they will write in the game and therefore you know that's not necessarily something they will accept from their parents and from their surrounding another good thing to come out if this is that we had a lot more partnership opportunities so with starlight for example we're not only pushing the game with them on their website and through their media but also at the same time in parallel we have dug out our version again that had more

medical information we've updated that and we now have two versions of the game so starlight is pushing the more medical version out through all of their hospital network now over the next couple of months they're gonna run some campaigns with us they're gonna really act as we push our products and we have other partnerships that have really asked to work with us as well on topics that we never thought our game might be relevant for but it is because you know the game is not about fixing one issue it's really about themes of what is happening in you as you go through something tough that comes your way and that could be you know it could be an accident it could be an illness it could be what's going on in the world right now it could be stress we see a lot of messages on shadow grim at the moment related to riots in the US for example where people feel unsure and just need to fence and so what we see is that the the the fact that people want young people want to reach out remains the same and that there's things no matter

what they are going through there's themes that come up like isolation loneliness frustration stress anxiety no matter what they're going through and I is that something that we really learning for from this that there is a lot more that we could do with the same game to help a lot more people we've also seen that we have a much higher number of impressions so people are actively in the stores looking for content looking for searching for things like mental health searching for emotional health searching for keywords like resilience and we are in the gaming category so for us that's a really good thing to see that that we still come up there but of course it also makes a huge difference in applications such as calm and others and they've seen numbers search as well so we do see that with everything that's happening in the world there's just a lot more people looking for content that may help them so that was a little bit of a roundabout pivot I

saw that there were some questions I'm not sure I'll scar yeah yeah I mean for me I'm gonna kick actually I should I should start with the first question actually a request to connect with you because Michelle Perez who I think Maundy a media group apparently is keen to talk to you about distributing through operators and telcos so I'll let you Amy I know I mentioned at the beginning but just to reiterate it's a free game we just want to help people so anybody that wants to help us just get the game into the hands of people that need it absolutely I mean my email address is here I'm also very easy to find on Google due to my weird name that's that's a very easy one I've just put you up here hope that's okay but it feels weird to talk to you and then they'll see you and though it's so good so good okay but I think what I find passing about this stuff is that we kind of have a

epidemic of mental health issues I think it's actually not just the fact that we are in crazy times I'm in the UK and particularly the u.s. in particular I think you know every since 2016 and obviously in the run-up to 2016 there's been a lot of social issues we've got the kind of climate change denial issue which is affecting a lot of people and we've got a whole bunch of like problems in the world and at the same time we have a I think of better understanding but mental health issues on human issues and you know whatever that might mean so things that strikes me is that there are moderation and safety concern issues that we have to kind of we have responsibility as developers of environments like this to make sure people are safe how do you go about doing that I mean I work with gotra mental health groups and one of the things is helping people ask them the question are they okay and directing

them to support do you do things like that yes yes we do so maybe just to back up a little bit so one of the numbers as you say it's not just about Kovac we started already pivoting earlier on when we just took out some of the medical questions and really focused on emotional health because we started seeing that that is a huge issue and according to for example the American psychology Association about 27% of all people young people which the World Health Organization defines us 10 to 24 year olds actually identify themselves as being regularly depressed that's a staggering number I mean if you consider that there's 1.2 billion people in that age group and then 27% of that that's a lot of people no matter what they're going through and no matter where they are right as you say you know there's things like ego anxiety there's there's so many new issues popping up and apart from that it is tough nowadays to be a team you know we wait when I was younger thankfully Facebook and other things didn't exist right so I was able to screw up without

people doing but there's just a whole lot more pressure to be perfect and there's a little more a lot more pressure you know to really become what other people are showing is is a new norm basically and so I think that's really important and so to answer the question about security yes obviously we do we we are as they say HIPPA compliance in Coppa compliance we have obviously rules and regulations in place we we are all of the content is on a secure server it's hosted on Microsoft Azure it's encrypted all that kind of good stuff that you need to do to check which is one of the reasons why we didn't allow commenting was because we're a very small group of people and so we couldn't provide the monitoring that is necessary according to the regulations to really be able to handle anything you know from from bullying etc and of course there's a specially in this audience you know there is a there

is a the metric called TTP right time to penis yep oh I'm so glad it wasn't me who said that woman so it's normally me who uses that I couldn't record just the cultures the people who don't know why they mention that a claim is so important on playstation home we had a little big planet game which was a whiteboard the very very first thing someone did when it went public was to draw a penis the very very first thing so the fact that you right so that's what we're doing now so we actually we've just gotten a small grant from the Dutch government to build out our community why are things we're gonna be doing it commenting and at that point we have we've now we're hiring resources we

hired a community manager and all the rates and and get the tools in place also because obviously there's also technology tools that can help with that if once we start growing bigger and weekend with manually anymore we also have a partnership with an organization in the US that does biometric registration so there are you know measurements and steps that we can take we're just doing them step by step because we also don't want to just implement stuff for the sake of implementing it and just see where it goes and more how it takes us we don't have a huge audience yet so we have about 30,000 players so at the moment we're able to handle it but we are steadily growing and we're getting to that point where we have to implement it but we do have the concepts in place already you have the people on board that can do it we have the partnerships that are necessary for it so it's now just really figuring out you know where do you what that what's the best timing to be able to do that the other thing maybe to mention is we do have a process in place if something you know comes ups like for

example we had one one issue which is actually also kind of funny one issue where we I got a call from one of our people in the team late night and she's like I think we have an issue there might be somebody that's suicidal and we went and looked and you know and obviously we can we can as you say we can send out notice you know with the resources we have resource lists we know numbers in different countries of course we work with psychologists so we can offer them for them to have a session with a psychologist to short talk so and obviously we have the help lines on our on our website so we can point them to that and so as I'm like looking into a case oh I'm wondering it how do we prepare that I'm like I think I know this user name who turned out to be to be our founder and she had not it was not suicidal at all she meant something like you know now the door finally you know I'm going through that last door and she really meant like I'm doing fine now yeah yeah oh wow that just shows you how important is to context that so one

of the things we always do when there is a message like last week there is a message about the riots and it just broke my heart and so all of our team actually made a created something in spray-paint and trust me of what I create is not pretty so you know they must be very happy that I do it because I'm terrible at it but we all create like a nice message then for that person and say okay in there there's comments we can give like you know like here's a hug and this hits home and I'm so sorry about it so there's comments we can you just can't for positive comments and then also we do reach out by email and just check in and say look we've noticed you you've posted something that's a little bit dark is it okay you know let us know and then just you know send back a send back an emoji if a thumbs up or middle thumb or down you know just so we know the next thing so psy has asked did you try to add video chat and I'm bitching to see if everything you've looked at no no there's a couple of things we're with psychologists we

decided to not due which seemed obvious one is give them an avatar right seems obvious it's a nice thing to reward people they can buy stuff for the avatar or whatever well first of all we're a free game but still they could get additional stuff but we decided not to do that because there is a psychology of making yourself look different and better and then you feel and we really want people to be able to be authentic and so therefore first world sort of vision seems seem better and for similar reasons we didn't want to do video chat it's a little bit more anonymous if you can just paint something in the game and if you can give comments rather than then having to go on a video because there immediately the pressure comes up a little bit again to just look nice right and to to sit better and to to I mean somebody that for example really feels depressed is probably not gonna go on a video chat but those are the people we really want to reach and so for now unless the kid and we do test by the way we regularly

we have play tests every set every two weeks and we have like a group of 250 kids that we call the kids but there are 16 to 24 year olds that are helping us continuously on the game that those are the first ones that we reach out to with survey's you know check in every month with them and say and ask those types of things like hey they sent these and these and these features you know still the same feeling or it hasn't changed and video is one of the things that everybody needs we said well almost everybody said no yeah and I think the reason for that is that you've got to be able to protect people and I think as soon as you have a video chat it becomes much harder to be anonymous and I think in this context you know that's really we've been working with a couple of companies in mental health issues and looked at how you can use narrative play to support positive mental health outcomes and again time and time again that sense of security not you know protecting your identity so that you can

be open and honest and that you can engage with other people who are going through related or similar problems in a context that's looked after by professionals I think they're really key factors yeah I agree and I think you know the game takes you through the process of healing right so it goes from disruption to disillusionment to discovery all along the way there's different areas in the city that are mapped to the questions that could fit that area so you have we have central which is the central role your issue takes in your life we have downtown which is your inner self you'll find questions about self confidence there and about your strength and your character Park is your meditative self so there's questions there that are more about you know emotional wellness and well-being and mindfulness and then commercial is a district where we ask more questions about how you portray yourself to others how others perceive you and how that might change over time and I think getting them through those metaphors and really having them you know connect with the Guardians the the characters in the

game that are then in that stage and behave like they're in that stage right and sort of play back what teens would do in that phase and in that stage I think that's that's a more powerful than just seeing somebody else there's so many video tools out there and and I agree what you with what you saying are separate psychologists that work with us agree as well you want to make sure that they that they feel like they can say anything and it's okay they're not judged there's so much more I want to ask you there are questions about if you're free hand you monetize all that kind of stuff sadly we're out of time donations donations it has to be done thank you very smooth at was amazing and I think it's really great what you go