Blueprints of Empathy - designing the Nijntje game

The Experience Phase

Chosen societal challenge: Mental Health – Anxiety, depression, and self-esteem.  

Mental health is a psychological state of a person and a basic human right enshrined in the EU value of human dignity. We are encouraged to protect our mental health but with many of us seeking validation and reassurance from social media, we become mentally exhausted and anxious in that process. This mental exhaustion could reduce a person’s productivity and draw them away from normal life, family and friends. They become closed up to their struggle and do not seek for help.  

Without open conversations about mental health, those affected may find themselves disconnected from society, cut off from receiving the necessary support, which will potentially lead to a wider community impact where mental health issues are neither acknowledged nor addressed effectively.

Chosen European value: Human Rights to mental health and human dignity.  

Game format: With our life-simulator educational board game, players use information cards, buttons, dice and more to go through a rescue phasal journey. In the game process, players understand and reflect on the challenges faced by victims of mental health and can support these people out of their mental health problem by taking on the roles of people with a mental health challenge. The players communicate amongst themselves throughout the game and that way can be more open about their situation.  

Cultural heritage visual documentation:

The everyday life of people

Genre: Educational

Theme: Self-awareness

  (A room with a large screen  Description automatically generated with medium confidence)

Our inspiration from the Sounds and Vision Museum is the line crossing media exhibition at the Museum. Society has metamorphosed into different stages with each era getting better but not without consequences. In this modern society, where we live in and breathe media, we most times trade out our power of self-worth to Modern media for mental exhaustion and anxiety and sometimes we cannot control how this happens.    

Design methods:

• Brainstorming with a Mind Map: A mind map is a diagram used to represent a number of ideas or things. Mind maps are methods for analysing information and relationships. Our team has used this design method to organise information visually. It helped us see the connection between each team member’s idea and how we could harmonise the ideas. Going forward in our project, this mind mapping help us to combine every team member’s idea to come up with a focus topic, a centraal theme and a genre for our game.
• Crazy 8: This is a fast-sketching exercise that challenges people to sketch eight distinct ideas within a specified time usually a maximum of 8 minutes. The goal is to push beyond your first idea, frequently the least innovative, and to generate a wide variety of solutions to your challenge. Our team used this method within a space of 4 minutes to build ideas for our game prototyping. It helped us filter various prototypes so that we could choose a particular prototype to focus on.
• Lego Lo-fi Prototyping - We did not let out ideas end at sticky notes and words of mouth. We started Lo-Fi testing with Legos and using that we developed our prototype further into better versions.

mind map

Crazy 8 exercise - Sketching game prototypes

Lego Prototyping

Game for culture – How can the player experience the societal challenge in your game

In the game process, players understand and reflect on the challenges faced by victims of mental health and can support these people out of their mental health problem by taking on the roles of people with a mental health challenge. The players communicate amongst themselves throughout the game and that way can be more open about their condition, and can receive help.

(Cover page image credited to Netherlands Sound and Vision Museum and Pink and blue head image of mental health credited to Harvard University)