We had the distinct pleasure to interview award winning designer Akshata Chitnis about their original and creative Game Design design work. Akshata Chitnis is an award-winning industrial designer, that makes our world a better place with their original game design works.
Akshata Chitnis ("AC") answered Design Interview ("DI") questions about their award-winning work The Warrior in You Game Design. Interview questions prepared by Frank Scott.
AC : I come from a culture where overworking is glorified from a very young age with priority given to results over constructive efforts. This starts to manifest into unhealthy levels of academic stress and a future trajectory of poor work culture. On a personal level I had struggled with these ideologies and wished to challenge them on a fundamental level. I observed the pattern now being amplified among young students experiencing academic stressors leading to increase in mental health struggles, loss of self-identity and resultant suicide cases. At the age of 10-12 years, academic stress based turmoil begins to ingrain in a student’s daily habits and behaviours. Hence, the project targets pre-conditioning to adapt to these stressors. The storyline of warriors battling with stressors disguised as demons was created to normalise and bring about acceptance related to mental well-being.
AC : My main goal with project was to initiate conversations in households regarding well-being, introduce and facilitate acceptance of healthy coping mechanism and allow kids to express themselves in a safe space that enables acceptance of each student’s varied coping capability. The game design is primarily based on Play & Talk therapy strategies by playing out life experiences through the tasks in the game, I wanted kids to learn to cope without feeling judged. The game also has a major element of role play immersion. The idea was to allow students to play the role of warriors, to normalise the struggles faced by the strongest warriors and instil empathy for self and others. I developed the strategy of gamifying coping mechanisms to trigger imagination and problem-solving among kids while they express their warriors’ minds.
AC : I hope to publish the game and bring it into the market. I also plan to study the cultural nuances of different regions with respect to academic stress and coping mechanisms to potentially target a global market in the future.
AC : I completed the entire project from research to ideation and execution as part of my undergraduate thesis over the time period of 6 months.
AC : The co-creation ideation workshops with young students and parents had helped me generate a range of ideas including toolkit designs, game design, virtual reality demonstrations and product designs. To better visualize and understand the viability of concepts, their Minimum Viable Prototype was created for user feedback. The feedback session revealed 'The Warrior in You' board game to be best approach to ensure behaviour change along with engagement. Since games result in dopamine secretion they are naturally engaging and result in low stress levels. The core structure of the game presents a challenge and repercussion system, providing instant gratification for reinforcing a behavior and consequences to deal with for negative conditioning. I made certain pivots after the review such as simplifying the language, enhancing the warrior storyline with the help of game principles and behaviour psychology frameworks.
AC : I intend to lease the production rights of the game to company to gain support in term of optimising the material, prints and packaging of the game as well as to advertise into a larger market. I hope to partner with a company already in the 'play' market segment to realise a collective vision.
AC : I wanted to truly challenge myself through the project by further developing my knowledge and passion for behaviour psychology and exploring concept of gamification and game theory to bring about a positive social impact.
AC : I was truly inspired by all board games I played while growing up. One of my favourite ones was called Life. I remember having some of the most fun conversations with my siblings, friends and parents while playing the game. The game was based around enhancing decision making skills while immersing in real-life situation in a light-hearted manner. This was my key inspiration to abstract academic stress related situations into a war scenario and build storyline, characters and tasks around it to ensure positive growth, habit forming and valuable conversations by the end of the game.
AC : The primary target audience for the game are 10-12 year old school students as well as their parents. The game was designed to be a fun interactive family activity that is engaging for kids and adults.
AC : 'The Warrior in You’ create narratives that blend the fantasy world with real-life challenges students face today to channelise creativity. It also enables parents to empathise and learn the coping means suitable for their child. Thus, being impactful to trigger change in the attitudes of students and parents. Unlike most mental health education solutions, the game includes all stakeholders like students, peers, parents, teachers and school environments through experience sharing, group problem solving and game scenarios. Various video games have attempted to depict mental health issues through graphic visuals and sound design which can also emotionally trigger certain users. They are also often targeted towards young adults and can be disturbing for young kids. While other physical games, products and well-being assessment quizzes exist their key limitations is that they include questions about emotions felt, coping means used or anxiety levels; which need to be moderated by a therapist or someone with training to provide appropriate responses. The unique aspect of ‘Warrior in You’ is its approach to present scenarios that allow self-exploration of coping means to adopt healthy ways while normalising well-being struggles.
AC : Considering the target audience of the game being 10-12 year olds, I noticed a pattern among their behaviour to be a better, stronger and smarter version of themselves. This was often reflected in their choices of games, story books or even drawings they created. As I began developing the game I decided to enhance this need by creating warrior characters. The game is set in a mystic kingdom were the players assume the role of warriors or fighters saving the kingdom from demons. The warrior characters were created by abstracting the challenges and strengths observed among the student personas. The idea was to allow students to discover that they are all warriors in their own ways despite weaknesses and struggles. As a society we forward this image of a warrior being overburdened, overworked and often someone who does not care to own well-being. The game challenges this narrative and and teaches students the importance of prioritising personal well-being in order to be the best warrior. That's the story behind the name 'The Warrior in You', it is symbolic of the light within all of us that shines brighter as we learn to accept and cope with our struggles.
AC : During the research phase of the project I used photo journal ethnographies, interviews and surveys as a way to gather data which I then collated, organised and synthesised for insights in applications such as Notion and Miro along with physical post-its mind maps to allow easy collaboration. During the ideation phase I relied on hand sketches and low-fidelity prototypes created using easy to handle materials like paper, clay, wires and lego models. To develop the final visuals of the game I used softwares like Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. While I used 3D softwares like Adobe dimensions to visualise the 3D aspects of the game including palace backdrops and islands.
AC : I believe the mystical war theme style along with warrior characters that every child and adult can relate to through their storyline and attributes make this work distinctive. The wide range of situations and challenge tasks builds an intrigue among players and allows them to channelise their creative imagination to explore different fate with every decision they make. This unpredictability and adrenaline rush of defeating demons in the game is the primary reason for players to return to the game. The aim of the game is simple: to empower students with healthy coping mechanisms to deal with stress by making them perform coping activities and enabling them to view the effects of their choices on well-being.
AC : The project was co-created with young students, their parents and psychologists. Expert opinions and technicalities of coping mechanisms, play and talk therapy were incorporated by consulting with psychologists throughout the process. The game was also reviewed by Game designer and experts in the fields of game theory and psychology to evaluate the engagement and learning levels of the game.
AC : Initially I was also advised to consider creating a digital video game over a board game. However I believe that in a topic surrounding mental health, technology can end up doing more harm through complexities of addiction and add barriers of less human connection. I therefore decided to build a physical format for the game with a hope to bring families together to sit around a table and have an open chat and laughter through the game. However a lot of softwares and technological support went behind creating the actual graphics and model of the game prototype to be able to bring it into a physical model.
AC : The study was conducted in Mumbai suburbs based on convenience sampling and involved around 133 participants through interviews and surveys conducted over various online and offline mediums. The study participants were- Students age 10-12 years, Students age 16-19 years, their Parents, Teachers and Child Psychologists. Students of progressing age groups (16-19) were studied to understand the pattern of academic triggers and their development into mental health problems. The participants were selected based on the age and user group criteria and included: 53 students, 30 parents, 25 teachers and 25 psychologists. The process followed for the project was done in four interconnected phases- Data collection to Empathise, Synthesis to Define problem target, Ideation and Conceptualisation, Validation and Testing. Each phase consisting of milestones achieved through design research and thinking tools. The data collection phase focused on qualitative and quantitative research using tools such as desk research, user interviews, surveys, etc. The information gather in this phase was synthesised in the next to articulate a problem statement for ideation. The concepts then explored were reviewed with users, psychologists and game designers in the validation phase.
AC : Mental health struggles and personal well-being are still such sensitive topics in our society. It was a big challenge for me to get people to open about these things and share their opinions.
AC : The parents and psychologists I worked with during the project along with my truly supportive family inspired me to apply for an international design competition. Their words of affirmation and reflections on the value of my project to the society at large is something I hold really close to my heart. Applying for this competition was my hope and dream of putting the project on an international platform to help other such young students and their parents to constructively address academic stress.
AC : The project truly helped me enhance my research skills. I was also able to develop my own framework based on human-centred design, rooted in behaviour psychology and gamification to drive positive change. The project helped me cultivate a resilient mindset to navigate through ambiguity to develop visualisations of challenges and insights at every step to align all stakeholders. I discovered the tools and methods to perform foresight research that allow me to trend map into the future by understanding systems and human behaviour to build aligned interventions for today. I learnt a great deal about intervention adaptability by exploring how the game can be adapted in form of workshops and interactive movies for schools as well as for psychology clinics to ensure larger impact and business sustainability.
