Video games have been called exciting, violent, addicting and fun, they have also been seen as useful in terms of education and training.
Why not as tools for mental wellness and relaxation?
My visual component is designed to allow for players to choose the amount of stimulation in the visual, motion, and the focus of the game objectives.
The basic objective is to measure the player's choices in terms of the kinds of gameplay that they experienced and try to understand what choices created a more relaxing experience.
Using data from this and tools like it, try to find a general direction for making games based upon relaxation and reducing stress.
Studies have shown that color palettes, repetitive motions, and simple focused-based tasks have been able to reduce the anxiety and stress inside of the autistic Spectrum mindset. In the same vein video game designers have been using those same tools to create exciting and uptempo variations of gameplay and entertainment.
By the very nature of video games they can be built to be addictive, exciting and have a lot of stimulation to engage the gamer into playing for hours. Building for video games with current technologies is exciting, fun and offers a lot of opportunity to create some real interesting mechanics inside the game.
To switch gears, though, to build a game for relaxation, developers should consider how to reduce the amount of stimulation and still maintain a hold of gameplay mechanics in order to achieve a different kind of experience for the players.
Polls have shown that video game players find all types of video games to be relaxing in some sort of fashion but most of these kinds of actions tend to be cobbled together or in between different tempos and paces seen in game development.
The design of the visual component is focused around three essential elements based on the research and studies which are color movement and focus based objectives. This is a simple lane runner that will offer players to collect pieces of notes to build a song structure.
After the player collects a certain number of notes they will have created a loop which will continue to play as long as the players move along the track. As they collect the correct notes and start building their song loops, the tempo of the game will pick up moving the player faster along the track. Once a loop is created a player will be offered choices which can increase the amount of environment art, music tempo, game speed and the types of focus objectives.
The goal is to show how a game can still possess game-like qualities and still be used in a relaxing way, and help start developing a language for design systems which define this new genre, so as not to bury these titles within a general location like "Casual."
Testing concepts will be based upon the player's choices as they run through the game, whether they use more visual stimulation in the environment or less. What are their music tempo choices are slower or faster whether the gameplay speed is slower or faster? All this data will be collected and will go in coordination with simple poll questions at the end of their gaming experience.
With the actual overall goal to define what was more relaxing. Using these types of general starting points developers can start looking to build more exciting or even more relaxing video game concepts in order to create a more sustainable genre.