Initial Ideation Process

I had a list of about 30 ideas, roughly written down as vague words or sentences to draw tangents from.

I eventually ended up filtering this down to about 3 ideas:

1. A ‘Doom-Scrolling’ mechanic for a game

2. Integrating machine learning and AI

3. A mindfulness/meditation surrealist game

I finally chose making a mindfulness/meditation app, that uses surreal game mechanics to train the subconscious mind to be more creative, influenced by Dali’s bell and Jesse Schell’s subconscious and brainstorming tips (Schell 2008).

I was also driven by my personal experience with creative burnouts, and general difficulties being creative sometimes. And since the game deals with such topics I was hoping it would help the user to understand themselves as well.

Research

I took printouts of three research papers and have read one of them completely so far. The paper (Lukoff et al. 2020) talks about what buddhists, yogis and therapeutic teachers think about meditation apps, and also contains a lot of references to Dahl and Davidson’s contemplative practices.

They go on to highlight some problems, the ones that stood out for me are 

1. “McMindfulness” — the marketing of contemplative practice as a quick harmless exercise for relief 
2. Apps generally seem to focus on mindfulness and relaxation, when meditation could be used for invoking kindness and compassion.
3. Relaxation can yield mindfulness through container and correlation pathways, mindfulness can yield to deconstructive or constructive experiences in the brain.

This research paper also served as a good reference for some design guidelines:

1. Designing for less dependence — the designer could omit soothing visuals and sounds.
2. Gradually reducing scaffolding — technologies should gradually shift students to lesser reliance on extrinsic processes.
3. Transfer mindfulness — from formal to informal practice to everyday life.

Another resource of research was the book of Surrealist Games (Alastair Brotchie 1995). I tried to note down any and all games from the book that sounded interesting. I loved the surrealist nature of these games, the ‘Dali’s bell’ feeling that all these games give out. But generally speaking it was a bit difficult for me to think about ways to implement these digitally, while integrating meditation.

As mentioned previously, a large part of the inspiration was also Jesse Schell’s book, and I found a quote that he had referenced in the book that really helped me articulate my own thoughts on what the game is supposed to be – 

“Should we be mindful of dreams?” Joseph asked. “Can we interpret them?”

The Master looked into his eyes and said tersely: “We should be mindful of everything, for we can interpret everything.” – Herman Hesse, The Glass Bead Game (Schell 2008)

Prototype Development

• Inspired by the ‘fumage’ technique in the book of surrealist games(Alastair Brotchie 1995), I wanted to create a prototype that used the technique of fumage to create a heightmap for a procedurally generated terrain.
• I wanted to make a kind of emotional prototype to test if this is something I would get excited about, and to see if I can execute it. The idea is that if I can get a prototype to work in under 3 days, it would be simple enough to take forward with me for the rest of the project.
• In the beginning, I didn’t know what exactly about this prototype would be exciting. Would it work as a mini game among many other mini games? Or would I want to use it as a platform to build on top of?

Play Testing Feedback

Now after having a prototype and testing it, I’ve felt that it is fairly exciting, and a nice procedural mechanic to build on top of to encourage the user to meditate and create a world.

Upon showing it off to friends however, the general consensus seems to be initial polite excitement followed by “now what”. And Jeff made a really good point, which is that if I go forward with this route, theres a good chance my game could end up being a bunch of mini-games, rather than one coherent game.

Bibliography

(3) ALASTAIR BROTCHIE. 1995. A Book of Surrealist Games. Available at: http://archive.org/details/a-book-of-surrealist-games-alastair-brotchie-mel-gooding [accessed 4 Feb 2025].

(2) LUKOFF, Kai et al. 2020. ‘From Ancient Contemplative Practice to the App Store: Designing a Digital Container for Mindfulness’. In Proceedings of the 2020 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference. 1551–64. Available at: http://arxiv.org/abs/2006.09521 [accessed 4 Feb 2025].

(1) SCHELL, Jesse. 2008. The Art of Game Design.