Respawn, Reload, Relate

Abstract

Games have the potential to not only entertain and immerse people, but can be used as vehicles for meaning-making. Given these qualities, games are approached as inspiration for caring technologies, especially for mental health. This transformative process often prioritises learning from games as systems, but not necessarily from the experiences of people with mental distress who play games for self-care. In this paper, we report on a participatory workshop series that sets out to further illuminate the connection between games, self-care and mental health from a humanistic, person-centred perspective. Over four workshops, we engaged 16 people with experiences of mental distress in speculative making activities and discussions of how self-care technology inspired by games could be re-envisioned. By thematically analysing our discussions and collective sense-making, we showcase how participants actively "re-frame" games for self-care. Finally, we sketch out how game developers and makers of gameful self-care technologies could build on our findings.