Inviting Grief into Games: The Game Design Process as Personal Dialogue

Jocoi is a game about grief over the death of a baby, developed through collaboration with an Austrian self-help group for bereaved parents, and this paper argues that game design should move away from an "emotioneering" model, in which designers engineer emotional responses through stimulus and reaction, toward facilitating players' own emotional dialogue. The authors position the work as a methodological contribution as much as a design artifact, asserting that metaphor-based, participant-centered design can engage painful experiences without retraumatizing those who live them, and that the informants themselves should be treated as experts on their own experience.

The central evidence comes from a "TrauerSpiel" workshop in which mothers who had experienced pregnancy or infant loss were asked to build miniature physical models of a "planet on which your dead baby lives." The resulting models, which included a bliss planet, a fireside planet, a sheep planet, and a cave planet, consistently depicted idyllic, timeless spaces centered on nurturing the lost child, with constraints such as rivers, cave walls, and flames embodying harder existential questions. A structured "admiration" discussion revealed that participants' perspectives differed in ways tied to how recently they had lost their children, a finding the authors treat as an important signal about the temporal dimension of grief.

These workshop materials were then translated by a student design team into Jocoi, which uses a sheep-and-river metaphor, a three-step loss structure, and mouse-based caregiving mechanics. Playtesting with informant mothers yielded consistently positive responses, with participants reporting that the aesthetics, pacing, and structure reflected their own emotional experiences, and two mothers expressing a wish to replay the blissful first stage. The authors conclude that games can act as facilitators of dialogue about loss, noting that the game prompted conversations about grief among some players, particularly those aware of the project's context. The study's scope is narrow, centered on a small group of bereaved mothers in Austria, and its conclusions about broader audiences remain correspondingly tentative.