Project Obrigado Detour: Should Games Be More?

I’m about to stretch my liberal arts muscles a little bit, so this may be a bit dry and possibly pompous.  Bear with me and I promise to make some kind of lewd comment at the end, possibly followed by a shouty non-sequitur.  Good?  Alright.

This being the internet there is always debate on every topic, and consensus is rarely ever reached.  Further, topics that should be intelligently discussed are degraded by flame wars and troll-baiting.  I don’t think that means anyone should avoid an argument - I’m a lifetime believer in the power of conversational conflict to generate new thoughts.  What follows logically is that gratitude should happen when someone disagrees with you, not resentment and defensiveness.  Why would anyone be upset when presented with the opportunity to think about something?  And since an idea cannot survive without its first principles, I’m descending into the one I believe to be core to my project like Tyrion Lannister into a pile of whores.  Games can and should be more than entertainment without sacrificing their nature, which is art.  This'll be damn long without tackling the problem of gamification and addiction so that'll come later, because I appreciate the danger there.  Lets just say I've had some first-hand experience.  Also, I guess y’all don’t have to wait until the end for the lewdness.

This goes back to the age-old question about whether art exists for its own sake or whether it exists as a tool for another end.  Whether that end is something positive or negative the question remains the same.  I believe, like so many other things, the answer lies somewhere in the middle.  There’s no denying the fact that art can be used as a tool.  Its been used to pose moral questions, force important issues to the consciousness of society, and even to implant beliefs that on the outside appear repellent.  But should it?  I believe so, and further I believe a medium isn’t fully actualized until it is effectively used as such.  Because it’s also a relatively new medium, and because of my job I’m fairly familiar with it, I’ll use the example of television.  It wasn’t so long ago that TV was considered a completely useless pursuit - it was called the boob tube and “Kill Your Television” stickers were considered by some to be the mark of the true intellectual.  Also, television wasn’t “real art”.  But then came Sesame St., Schoolhouse Rock, Mythbusters, and others who were using the medium of television to teach as well as entertain.  In the educational system, finishing third grade with grade level or higher literacy is an important marker in whether or not a child will graduate high school.  In other words, if a child is reading well in third grade their chances of graduating high school increase dramatically.  And one of the biggest contributors to early school literacy?  Sesame St.  Slowly but inevitably people started to recognize television as something more than mindless entertainment, and in the process it has come into its own as a respected artistic medium.  Does that mean it wasn’t art before?  No, television has always been real art.  But once its capacity to inform and spark a sense of wonder was recognized, its power and depth increased.

But let’s think about the art itself for a moment - how exactly does it feel being forced to be useful and inspiring all the time?  In other words, shouldn’t art be able to exist for its own sake?  Beauty doesn’t have to be useful to inspire.  In fact, if utility is the primary focus and beauty - or in the case of games, play - the result is either bad art or no art at all.  I mentioned an article way back in my first blog on Project Obrigado that talked about games that were made to serve as mental health tools, and why they failed.  They failed because they were designed by shrinks with the utility of making someone better the prime focus instead of play.  They weren’t fun, and therefore defeated the purpose they were trying to accomplish.  You can’t twist art around and stuff it into a mold you create for it, you have to let it become what it truly is.  If that is something that only evokes emotion (or entertains), that’s just fine.  Games are art because (to paraphrase Aristotle) they are things that evoke emotion (fun, play, the heroic feeling or whatever) by using a particular medium (hardware and software).  Perhaps we should just leave them as they are.

Shiva the ice summon, right?  Bet those things are cold.  Moving on! Aristotle argues in his Ethics that true virtue lies somewhere in the middle between two extremes.  I happen to agree that finding the truest examples of things is somewhere in this blending, and whether or not you agree with me here depends on that statement.

Games, like any other art, can be taken down the line between emotion and thought to where they are evoking both.  And like any other art, if it goes too far it starts to become bad art (evoking thought more than emotion) and then not art at all.  Its not exact, I don’t think exactly the middle between thought and emotion is where designers should be aiming.  I don’t know where that line is, or even if there’s a line at all.  Like I said, I believe in the blending, and that extends into my views about human nature.  We are a mixture of thoughts and feelings, positives and negatives, material and metaphysical.  So I argue that in all our arts, such as literature and television and even music, this progression is inevitable and happens naturally.  It should be encouraged, not discouraged.

That does not mean that I think games that only entertain are worthless, but I do think games that evoke something beyond entertainment - whether that is thought, learning, a sense of wonder, or better well-being - create a response in us that is more powerful and complex.  Consider, for example, the Sweet Tart.  I frikkin love Sweet Tarts, and those chewy mini Sweet Tarts?  God help me, I have eaten an entire bag of those things in one day.  We’re talking the family sized bags you get from the supermarket here.  They are amazing little morsels of delight and I will never give them up.  But I can’t exactly live on them.  And if I’m really being honest, a plate of black cod with miso, some bok choy and noodles has more value to me than a roll of Sweet Tarts.

Food lust aside, mainly what I would like to say is that good games that are also tools are possible, as long as we let them be art and never forget the importance of play.  Perhaps this is already happening.  The artistry and technology needed to make those games more entertaining is also progressing naturally.  The importance of one doesn’t degrade the necessity of the other.

Right, I did promise random lewdness.  Well, there was the pile of whores up there.  And who doesn’t love a pile of whores?  Especially if there are boy whores because that’s just, you know, thoughtful.  Lip ferret rides for all!!

Project Obrigado: Self-Care and Tracking

Alright, enough fun stuff!  Or not, actually.  Speculating and plotting out aspects of my brainchild is fun.  I took a bit of a break because I want to lay out the self-care aspects of the game, but I’m still kind of puzzling over how I want it to work.  I’m still going with the idea of logging activities and having those activities affect your characters Equilibrium/Endurance stats, but its a little hard to nail down what those activities should consist of.  It took me a long time to develop what I’ve got here into complete sentences, partly because its kind of a slippery thing and partly because its been a hard couple weeks.  Work is going really well, but its amazing how simple daily responsibilities can be mentally and emotionally exhausting.  I had a bit of a bad day the other day, narrowly avoiding an irrational crying jag right at my desk.  Tons of fun.

One thing a lot of people with depression struggle with is shame about their emotions.  So before I get into any thoughts about the project I just want to tell anyone who runs across this page that its ok.  Our feelings are real and nothing to be ashamed of just because we can’t find a reason for them.  We can identify our triggers and manage them, but emotions are going to happen.  Sometimes they will happen at the worst possible times, and for completely inexplicable reasons.  But if you take a minute, do something good for yourself that can be as simple as walking outside or texting a friend, and just accept that the feelings are there eventually they won’t seem as bad.  I mean, day before yesterday I got upset because I caught a glimpse of Bob Ross on the TV next to my desk and his painting seemed melancholy to me.  Bob Ross, people.  The Happy Painter.  So anyways, your feelings aren’t bad, they don’t mean you’re crazy.  They’re just feelings.  Moving on.

As I said earlier, the one of the places from whence this mutated idea came is Fitocracy.  But its easy to plug in how far you rode on your bike and how fast you were going to get an approximate “calories burned”.  That doesn’t apply to mental health.  There’s no set litmus test to measure someone’s progress, so the formula of “Thing Done + Difficulty Doing Said Thing = x Amount of Progress” really won’t work unless heavily customized to the user.  When I can find some interested mental health professionals I plan to ask them about this and get help working on some kind of fluctuating metric, but in the meantime I figured I’d jot down some ideas about what this tracking tool will keep track of.

The way I see it, there are two main things a person can do to increase their mental stability and quality of life - positive activities and introspection.  Positive activities are easier to measure so I’ll start with that, and I’ll be using myself as an example to elaborate a bit.  I’ve had a problem with insomnia for a good portion of my life.  Its not as bad as it could be, but it’s something that comes up every once in a while.  Sometimes its just a couple days of only sleeping for an hour or so and then it goes away, but I’ve had solid months where I was getting maybe three hours a night and eventually over the counter sleep aids stopped working on any level.  One thing I know for a fact increases the likelihood of troubled/nonexistent sleep is gaming too late.  So something as simple as entering in what time I put the computer to sleep or turned off the PS3 is something I could get points for.  Even though the turning off of something is kind of a non-activity, by doing so I am putting my long term well-being (getting a good night’s sleep and keeping my body clock running smoothly) over what I want in the short term (pwning more n00bs).  Also, anyone who’s been depressed knows the feeling of just wanting to sit on the couch/lay in bed and blow off every single one of your plans even if said plans are to do something you normally enjoy.  Its part of the deal.  You know in your brain that getting up and doing whatever thing you had planned will probably be fun and make you feel better but you just can’t summon the energy to do it.  Maybe if there was a fancy new special action involved that might be the last bit of encouragement you need to get off the couch.  You could even rate the difficulty on a scale of “Meh, I’m kind of tired” to “All the color has been sucked out of the world and the sidewalk is going to swallow me whole if I so much as step foot outside”.  On the other hand, there’s no guarantee forcing yourself out of the house will help or make things worse.  There are times when forcing yourself to be around people just makes the black hole of your existence feel even more alien and separate from everything.  So tracking positive activities isn’t something I can lay out concretely at this point, but I’m keeping my feelers out for people who have training in this area that might be willing to advise me.

A little easier to pin down as a positive, which isn’t to say its simple, is introspection.  I think there’s enough evidence out there that our psyches are formed by our experiences that I don’t really need to get into a discourse about it.  I don’t believe that people with messed up childhoods are guaranteed to end up depressed or anti-social any more than I believe people with a completely normal upbringing will end up lawyers and healthy family types.  There are so many factors involved, but one common thread is the necessity of examining your experiences and figuring out how they affect you.  Another thing I believe is that medication on its own isn’t enough.  Its true that some of us just have some chemical imbalance that make us sad more often than other people, but humans are creatures of body and spirit with each part affecting the other in turn.  Introspective exercises are something concrete that can be completed for progress by simply filling out a form with a few questions.  An example of an exercise is one I completed recently that just had a few questions:

Think of a situation that triggered your anxiety.  What happened?

Why do you think this situation made you more anxious than normal?  Where do you think those feelings were coming from?

What did you do to deal with the anxiety?

Did it help?

How did you end up reacting to the situation, and how do you think you can do better if something similar happens?

Pretty simple, right?  Answers don’t need to be really long or detailed, but I like the idea of greater rewards for greater effort.  Of course, this would mean evaluation beyond a simple “was the exercise completed” metric.  I’m starting to get the impression the more I think about this is that while an experience-calculating metric will be crucial in the end there will need to be human hands working on evaluating players and their participation.  This means users will have to be alright with others reading what they write.  Granted, the people reading their responses will be professionals under the same confidentiality boundaries any therapist would be, but that could be a hurdle for some people.

That was a little more stream-of-consciousness-ish than I originally intended.  Hopefully it makes a little bit of sense.  I’ve also got news on a possible funding idea.  I’ve said before that if I ever make Project Obrigado a reality it will be free forever.  Free to download, free to play, and completely run on donations.  That’s a daunting prospect, and not something I think can be accomplished by something like Kickstarter or Indiegogo.  While those platforms are really effective, my perception is that they are geared more for a big fundraising push that is finite, whereas this would have to be an ongoing fundraising effort.  While I was setting up my NaNoWriMo profile today (yes, I am doing it despite having a batizado, Dreamforce, and hopefully Korean BBQ in LA to go to in November because I am a crazy person) I came across stayclassy.org.  I actually have a short phone meeting with someone from that organization to talk about my real-job’s fundraising efforts, but I’ll be filing what I can away for later.

Assorted Musings

The last few days have been sadly void of many solid ideas I feel like I can articulate yet, probably because its been a bit of a crap week.  Some people become more prolific when they’re having a hard time of it, but I find my creativity takes a nose-dive when the depression kicks into high gear and I can’t really organize my thoughts.  So I’ve decided to switch gears a little for this post and instead of talking about one thing in detail I’m just going to throw some stuff out there that’s been careening around in my brain.

Its been pointed out to me by someone with more experience that I might be off the mark a bit envisioning this game as an MMO.  Those things are huge and involve a metric ton of maintenance and support.  Trying to build one that’s not only functional, but also fresh and new might be out of this project’s wheelhouse.  I’ve been pondering something closer to a cooperative stage/hub based RPG.  Before I go on, let me mention that I have not played very many MMOs.  I downloaded the free trial of WoW and was so bored after a couple days that I seriously couldn’t understand the amount of time and money people put into it.  The only MMO I really got into was Guild Wars 2.  Mechanically that game is tons of fun and I’ve done a lot of the story missions to get the shiny toys that come as rewards, but I have to say my immersion was completely shattered by the story bits.  The focus of your personal story is that you become the military leader that saves the land from unspeakable evil, but there’s always the glaring fact that everyone else in the game is that same military leader.  I would rather have a story that makes the entire community of players a collective force that beats back the unspeakable evil, and hub-based missions might be better suited for that.  And easier.  Some of the missions/stages/whatever could be for solo players and some could be for a medium-to-large party.  Anyway, that’s where my mind's been going.

Speaking of unspeakable evil, I’m getting a better idea of where I want to go with the world-building.  A few years ago I wrote a thing for NaNoWriMo, which started out as a vampire story (I know I know).  After November was over I decided that it was a crap story but had some potential if I expanded the world beyond what I’d originally written.  I’ve been working on it for way too long for it to be as rough as it is, but I think there’s potential there.  I had a revelation when I started re-writing it that if there was something I wanted to put in there, I could find a way to put that thing in there.  Seems obvious, but there you have it.  In any case, the world in the story draws heavily from the Japanese onryo or vengeful ghost, a concept with frightens me more than practically any other thing that exists, and as much as I am fond of hyperbole I am not exaggerating here.  I’ve gone into the philosophy of the myth and why it scares me so much - if I can find that particular blog from years ago I’ll post it.  But anyway, after I started expanding my world into other areas of horror and fantasy besides vampires magical things started to happen.  I toyed with the idea of every pantheon of gods being lesser aspects of one nameless archetype.  I added dragons for no other reason than I frikkin’ love dragons, but I think I found a way for it to work.  Ever have one of those moments where something is so completely clear and obvious you can’t imagine why you didn’t think of it in the first place?  That’s what happened here.

I thought about it and decided to post a link to part of the fragmented mess that is this story if some folks wanted to get an idea of the setting, which is quite urban fantasy/horror.  If you do decide to read it keep in mind that it is SUPER rough around the edges, but I’m putting it up here anyway.  With the stuff that’s been going on recently, “having something I wrote eviscerated on the internet as crap” isn’t really that scary.

That being said, don't eviscerate it.  Or at least, eviscerate constructively.

On the subject of scope, I’ve had a few more thoughts about the target audience for this tool/game.  I said before I that I would like to have it be available for anyone with a mental illness, and I’m sticking with that eventual goal.  But I think I’m going to have to focus on one or two in the beginning and try to branch out from there because the spectrum of mental health issues is so broad and dealt with in so many different ways.  This came up because of a close friend of mine who has bipolar disorder and is in the middle of a manic episode.  Bipolar is a completely different beast from what I deal with - when I get depressed being inactive is the worst possible thing I can do.  I have to make myself get out of the house, play a game, ride my bike, or something that forces my mind to break out of the pattern its fallen into.  Not so with someone on the edge of mania.  The more stimulation they get, the worse their mental state becomes in my experience.  Which is a problem from a game design standpoint because games are by definition meant to stimulate.  So perhaps for the time being it would be best for me to focus on the problems that are more in my wheelhouse and expand later if possible, and after a lot of consulting with professionals and folks who suffer from more diverse issues.

On the technology side of things, HTML5 is exciting because its a coding language born in the mobile age and there is just a ridiculous amount of potential applications for it.  If you follow Day9tv at all (and I do, rather obsessively I admit), you’ll have seen some exciting new tech approaching on the horizon in the form of Artillery, a gaming platform built in HTML5 and Javascript.   I’ve also learned a bit about Sencha, an HTML5/Javascript framework geared towards mobile apps.  My imagination may be going a little nuts here, and like I said I’ve only ever dabbled in programming, but between these two things I’m thinking that this project can be created entirely without the need for a software download.  And since they're both supported by people I consider to be intelligent and insightful - my brother does a lot of Sencha development in and lets just say I have a bit of an inferiority complex when it comes to him - I think they're pretty darn promising.

I'm hoping my thought processes will be more clear in the next couple days and I can start mapping out more details on the self-tracking tool I want to include and the social platform.  In the meantime, thanks again to everyone who's still reading and giving feedback.

Project Obrigado: Character Creation

As I said on Twitter earlier today (Look, I have a widget! Make with the following.), the amount of positive feedback and offers of help I’ve gotten for this project has been amazing.  I have no illusions about being able to do this alone, and so seriously every link and suggestion is awesome.  So, onward and upward.  Character creation is something incredibly near to my heart, so I may be spending more time on it than I should.  One of my favorite parts of starting a new RPG is creating my character - I spend a lot of time in the customization screens and if there is an option for creating your own class I jump on that shit like nobody’s business.  But beyond my own personal preference, I do think that the process of character creation is pretty important for this project.  First off, I’ve decided that each player will have one character.  For one thing, that makes things simple and simple is good for a launching point.  Also, I mentioned in my last post that I want the focus of this game to be creating an extension of yourself and having that extension of you increase your stability.  Every aspect of the game should reflect and support that fundamental goal, and having more than one character would seem to contradict that.  But I also don’t want players to be locked into the choices they made at the start of the game - I’ll get into that in a bit.  

Most RPGs have you start out with a race and a class, but I’ve decided to kind of throw that mechanic out the window.  Hold on, don’t break out the pitchforks yet, I swear there was a logical reason behind this.  Locking players into one race and class at the beginning of the game has always been something that bothered me.  In tabletop RPGs there’s enough elasticity in the system to let you build pretty much any character you want, and that’s an idea I want to emphasize.  With enough effort you can make yourself into the kind of person you want to be.  Within reason, of course.  The kind of person I want to be is a smoking hot half-dragon (silver, natch) but that’s kind of outside the realm of possibility so I had to settle for a tattoo.  Back to the point, and that is that this project is focused on proactively making your life better.  Its easy for people like us to see ourselves as victims and to some extent we are victims of genetics/brain chemistry/circumstance/whatever, but I don’t believe that mindset is helpful.  The effect I would like to see is a shift from a victim mindset to a hero mindset.  Because let’s be honest, when we choose to deal with all the crap instead of letting it overwhelm us and make the effort to create for ourselves the life we want we are heroes.  I’m kind of getting sidetracked here.

So the first part of character creation will be customizing your appearance, and I should mention that in my brainstorming process I’m operating in the fantasy world where money is not a concern.  All major game production companies have called me personally to commit their support, I’ve got funding from the UN, and to top it all off an alien landed on my patio the other day that poops gold.  These are the parameters my brain has created, ok?  So in this perfect world appearance customization would be ridiculous, and pretty much the only restriction is that your character is humanoid.  Want to be a tall purple ferret-faced person?  Fine, go nuts.  Pouty-faced douchenozzle with too much hair product?  Done and done.  Wings?  Sure.  Horns?  Fantastic.  But that’s all it would be, appearance.  There wouldn’t be any bonuses or negatives attached whatever appearance archetype you chose.  Also, beyond cosmetic changes like hair color or tattoos changing your appearance wouldn’t be easy.  I’m not saying it would be impossible, but there would be some kind of quest involved if you want to drastically alter your character.  Being able to just pull up a menu and make yourself a foot taller would break the immersion I think.  

The next logical step in the RPG process would be choosing a class, which is where the most drastic changes come into play.  I want people to be able to create whatever type of character they want, so instead of defined classes there will be an array of action trees you can select from, and you won’t be limited in the number of action trees you can invest in.  Like I said in my last post, your character’s Equilibrium will determine how many special actions you have and you can put them anywhere.  So if you want to be a fire-magic wielding tank in heavy armor you can totally do that, just remember you will probably need a high PP to be able to use the armor.  If you want to mostly use ranged attacks but also dabble in some illusion and summoning magic that’s fine too.  I actually would encourage players to pick whatever looks attractive to them and try it out without thinking about it too much because one thing I am taking from D&D is the ability to take back your choices.  If you decide at level 9 that you don’t actually like the spear-throwing alchemist you created you can reset all your special actions and chose new ones.  This won’t be something you can just do whenever you want, however, but there would probably be a couple ways you can go about it.  There might be a quest you need to go on to defeat some big bad and open up a portal to the distant past to reshape your destiny.  Or, and I’m including this because no matter what the Internet trolls say there are gamers in this world who are more interested in the story than the combat, you might have the option of writing up a scenario that gives a reason why your character suddenly has an entirely new skillset.  If its reviewed and approved (so no submitting a 250 word essay full of Lorem Ipsum) you’re set to pick another archetype.

The third part of character creation is the one unique to this particular game, which I’m just calling your Profile.  This is where you would outline what kind of issues you face in your life and which ones affect you the most at any given point.  You can change your profile at any time without jumping through any hoops.  To use myself as an example, I deal with depression coupled with a fair amount of anxiety.  A few years ago I would have ranked depression as the thing that made life the hardest.  But lately, since I’ve switched industries and have a job that I actually like for once the anxiety has played a much bigger role.  Everybody’s issues shift in their ability to affect us, sometimes over the course of only a few days.  Whatever you outline in your profile would affect whatever metric calculates how many “points” your character receives for certain things.  For example, someone who has anxiety and rejection issues would receive more points in Charisma for publicly publishing a journal entry than someone who doesn’t have those particular issues.  And by “metric” I mean “sorcery”.  Because at this point I have no idea how that would be set up. Your profile might also affect how your character reacts to different areas of the game world, with some players receiving bonus in an area while another might not.

So that’s character generation.  Its a little rough, my thoughts weren't quite as organized as I wanted them to be when I started writing this but I wanted to get it down to keep my momentum going.  As always, comments and suggestions are welcome, even its to tell me I’m insane.  Just do me a favor and let me know which bit you think is impossible so I can re-think my strategy.

Project Obrigado - Abilities and Dependencies

So I thought if I was really serious about this project it would need a name.  “Obrigado” is an expression of gratitude in Portuguese, so it seemed appropriate.  Why Portuguese?  Because its the language of capoeira and I would like to learn to speak it one day because capoeira is one of the things keeping me sane at the moment. (Holy run-on sentence, Batman!)  In any case, I’ve had so many ideas over the last few days; they’re practically popping out of my ears.  Also, they were all over the map, so the first thing I decided needed to happen was section out all the things I’d have to think through before I could even approach another person with this idea.  I even made a little diagram:

Yes, its in MS Paint.  Judge all you want, I am impervious to your disapproving stares!  The arrows between the boxes represent relationships between objects - I’m starting to be really grateful I learned a bit of object-oriented programming right now.  Some of the relationships are more of a parent-child dependency, but a lot of the objects are interdependent.  Once I started mapping it out it was pretty clear to me that the area that had the least dependency on other objects was the core mechanics of the game.  From this several other objects would need to take their functionality, so that is what I focused on first.  

I’m not entirely sure I’m using the right language when I say “core mechanics” but what I mean is the stats and bonuses that affect a character’s progression and how they relate to the various aspects of the game.  The concept that I’m working with is that to fully take advantage of the game a player needs to build a fully whole and well-balanced character, and in doing so build themselves into a more complete individual.  Our subconsciousness is affected by the things we experience, and I believe if the focus of this project is completeness and balance in-game it will extend out into real life.  I might have my head in the clouds on that one, and I’d appreciate any thoughts people might have on the subject.

Another crucial fact that needs to be integrated into the game is that in real life the only way we can make progress in something is by doing it, so I’ve decided that progressing in the game won’t be focused on gathering XP, but using your abilities.  Managing a mental illness isn’t something that just happens as I well know, and building on my previous statement about balance I’ve found that you can’t just do one thing and have everything fall into place.  You can’t only take your meds, or only exercise, or only do any number of things.  Being healthy is about building an arsenal of good habits, all working in concert to actively maintain your stability.  You can represent that necessity in-game by making leveling dependent on making progress in every ability, and having each ability tied to a different kind of activity.  Here’s what I’ve come up with, and hopefully it isn’t too vague since there are some things like equipment mods and tracker details I’ll be fleshing out later:

Physical Prowess:  A pretty straight-forward ability, PP would be increased in-game mostly by making melee attacks.  The higher your PP gets, the more damage you do with melee weapons in general.  Some weapon and armor mods will require a high PP to use.

Agility:  Also leveled in-game, but by making ranged attacks or using weapons that have a lower power focus but a high focus on critical strikes.  A high Agility means a higher chance of critical strikes and like PP some weapon and armor mods require a high Agility to use.

Endurance:  This ability is increased by consistently using the tracker.  The more consecutive days you log self-care activities the higher it gets.  There may also be a temporary negative effect if there is a significant gap in days where activity is logged - but its wiped out completely upon resuming using the tracker.  High Endurance means more health and more inventory space.

Equilibrium:  Equilibrium is mental discipline and focus.  I’m trying to avoid genre-specific terminology since I haven’t decided exactly what kind of environment I would like it to be set in.  But having a high Equilibrium would increase your access to special actions, how many special actions you can have active at once, and how many different types of weapons you can equip at once.  It would be increased by using the tracker to log a variety of activities, and by providing more details in your log entries.

Charisma:  This one would be increased by participating in the social platform, for example by being available to connect with players through the panic button, or making your journal entries visible to others.  That last one I had to chew on for a while - after all it’s not easy to put your own internal struggles out in the open even in a closed community.  But I think I would include it because the purpose of the social platform is to support other members of the community, and making some (not all, you’d be able to choose which entries to publish and which to keep to yourself) entries available could help other members feel like they aren’t alone.  It would also build your own awareness that you aren’t a freak or a monster, just a person with a problem.  As for in-game effects - a high Charisma would unlock more customization options for your characters appearance and make your special actions more powerful.  I’m already biting off more than I can chew, so I don’t know if I want to include mounts or familiars in the mix.  But if I did, high Charisma would give you access to more powerful ones.  Also, some weapon and armor mods would require a high Charisma to use.

That’s pretty much it for character stats.  Of course you could play the game with all your focus on one or two areas. Someone who exclusively uses the tracker could get by with their high health and array of special actions, but wouldn't be able to use a lot of the equipment mods (more on that later) and leveling would be a lot slower. What I am trying to do here was outline a system that would make the game more fun the more well-rounded a character you have.  Also, the progress-by-doing model neatly answers the “who gets the experience” question.  Answer: it doesn’t matter who drops the monster - if you participate, you progress.  This will help build the cooperative atmosphere I think is crucial to have.  And its not exactly the same as a shared XP model - if one player is tanking damage while another hangs back and shoots, the former will get Endurance progression and the latter will progress in Agility.

The next logical step seems like character generation, so I’ll go through that next.  If you’re wondering why I’m just plastering all my ideas up on the Internet as they happen - well, I find that blogging helps me organize my thoughts a bit, and if I try and hold myself to writing a little bit about it every couple of days the less likely I am to abandon the idea.  And if the pageview monitor in Blogger isn’t having me on, this has generated a lot more interest than I expected.  So expect more content rolling out.  

Is it possible to Gamify mental health?

Gamification is fairly trendy these days.  Companies are trying to use it to boost productivity, its come up in the education field, and sites like Fitocracy use it to motivate people to exercise more.  It's a subject I’ve followed with curiosity for a while now but never had any specific area I thought it should be a part of that someone hadn’t already thought of until now.  

As some of you may know life went a bit pear-shaped for me lately.  I’ve struggled with depression and anxiety for most of my life but never really did much about it.  Recently I had to.  I seriously hesitated at first about airing this particular bit of dirty laundry in a public forum but I saw this incredibly edifying Youtube speech today on the topic - Thanks again for that, dude.  You know who you are. - and figured I should sack up.  Its hard to describe depression to someone who’s never experienced it, but the more of us who try to articulate what its like, the more understanding will develop.  Some days the idea of getting out of bed in the morning is so exhausting that you can’t bring yourself to do it.  Other days you might stare at the wall for an hour, crying for no damn reason.  You could be having a perfectly normal day, but all of a sudden you’re outside smoking a cigarette and the thought just randomly pops into your head that maybe it would be a good idea to put it out on your arm, and the thought is as normal and sane-feeling as someone else thinking that a smoothie sounds really good right now.  I was lucky enough to have a solid network of friends that supported me when things went sideways, but that’s not something everyone has.  That got me thinking - even better, it got me outside of my own head for once and so I’d like to share a bit of what I came up with.

Gamification is a powerful tool that can be used for good or for ill, one that I believe should be leveraged to help the people out there who don’t have support.  I don’t have a solid concept just yet, but what is forming in my head would ideally combine something like an MMORPG with bits of social networking and gamified self-improvement a la Fitocracy.  Ideally it wouldn’t be just for depressed people, but for everyone with mental health issues from substance abuse to schizophrenia.  It would be a game, a support system, and a tool to track your improvement.  It would be a hugely complicated thing to build, and thinking about it there are several hurdles I’ve come up with that would need to be resolved.  The one that popped up immediately is membership.  If this was to ever become a real thing, there are two things it would have to require of the user.  The first - that they have legitimate issues they need help with, know someone who does, or have had problems in the past.  How do you monitor that kind of thing?  You could require a reference from a psychiatrist or therapist, but some people don’t have either of those things.  Maybe you would need a reference from a current member, but that still excludes folks who might need help.  There could be a screening process, maybe you’d have to have a talk with a volunteer psychiatrist over Skype or something.  But the point is, there would have to be some way to keep the trolls out.  The second thing it would need from members is a legitimate desire to work on getting better.  Being healthy is hard work, sometimes its easier to stay miserable.  But something like this would need a communal feeling of hope and a drive to have a good life.  I can’t see it helping anyone otherwise.

Then there’s the game itself.  It would need to be fun.  You wouldn’t think this is a thing that needs to be said, but I’ve read a few articles by mental health professionals who have tried to gamify the recovery process and the most common reason they fail is because the games they come up with just aren’t good.  And that involves a lot of things - writing, world building, mechanics, narrative, music, art, etc.  So far the system I’ve envision is intimidatingly complex and I’ve only vaguely mapped it out.  I’ve already decided it would need at least 3 different types of experience points, stats that are dependent on factors both in and out of the game, and a reward system that takes a persons “issues profile” into account and customizes rewards appropriately.  Its pretty daunting, especially when you must constantly keep the fun in mind.

The number of people who would have to be involved is huge.  I know a little bit about a few things like game mechanics, storytelling and even programming.  But not enough for something like this.  And not only would you need all the folks you would normally associate with game development, there would have to be mental health professionals and possibly social workers involved as well, not to mention web and mobile app developers.  That is a lot of people, which means a lot of money.  Money that would have to be donated because it would need to be free.

Yeah, to add onto the pile of complications funding for a project like this would have to come from grants and public donations for the most part.  Maybe I’d ask people to drop a one-time fee when they first pick it up, but it would be optional because at its heart the game would be about helping people who need it.  And then it would be free to play, and not “freemium”, straight up free.  It seems to me that in-game purchases, ads and other revenue generators would have no place in a game like this; it would detract from the mission, which means users would not be paying to keep it running unless they wanted to.  To bring a company on-board they would have to be ok with the idea of backing something with no possible financial reward.  I’ve worked in the non profit sector for a little while now and while things like Child’s Play give me hope, I know its really hard to get people from thinking “What am I getting for this money?” to thinking “What good can my money do?”  Not to mention getting a whole company to think that.

I haven’t only been thinking about the daunting aspects of this idea though, there are a few key features I’ve come up with that would be awesome.  The first one is the Panic Button.  If a player is having a horrible day, or that bottle of pills starts to look super tempting the panic button could connect them with another player who’s set themselves as being available to chat and help them through it (the panic button would need a 911 feature too, obviously).  Building on that, players who make themselves available for support would get rewards like extra spells or appearance customization.  Also equipment stats would be separate from appearance, with one kind of XP (for example logging your daily self-care routines) giving a player access to more stat bonuses while another (maybe helping people out through the panic button) would give you customization options.  Some character stats (like strength and endurance) could increase by fighting enemies in game, while others (like charisma or wisdom) increase by participating in the social aspect.

As long as this is, its only scratching the surface of the shit that’s been going through my brain the last couple days.  Its a little overwhelming I have to admit, but its been so long since I’ve been excited about something positive.  So to all of you guys out there who made sure I stayed safe and here, I give you this idea.  I’m going to pursue it, and maybe one day something will come of it.  And that’s thanks to you.