Games
These games are co-created with people about their lived experiences of depression and anxiety.
Content Warning: Please think carefully about whether the time is right for you to engage with these games. The games include accounts of depression and anxiety. If for any reason you aren’t in the right frame of mind to play these, you may decide not to play.
Research
Mental Jam originated as a Creative Practice Research at RMIT University, where I applied participatory action research to co-create video games with participants about their lived experiences of depression and anxiety as a form of creative self-expression.
Participatory video game development has been found to have therapeutic benefits. Video games have immense potential in the field of mental health, because they can benefit players by improving cognitive, motivational and emotional behaviours.
Talks and Publications
Freeplay 2021
GCAP 2021
as seen on
About
Back in the Philippines and Taiwan, I was working as a programmer in the games industry for a long time. However, my personal struggles with depression and anxiety made me quit my job and move to the other side of the world.
In 2016, I moved to the UK to study video game design. While I was there, I realised that this was my opportunity to do something meaningful. I decided to make a game about my experiences of depression, it’s a point and click game about the everyday life of someone living with depression where even the simplest things like waking up in the morning or making breakfast is a challenge. While I was making the game, I didn’t want it to be just my experiences, so I asked other people about their experiences of depression. I had over 100 contributions of people sharing their very personal stories, and although it makes me sad that so many people were going through those things, it also made me feel less alone.
Making a game about my personal experiences helped me open up about my struggles for the first time, and that inspired me to do a PhD. For my research, I co-create video games with people about their lived experiences of depression and anxiety as a form of self-expression to raise mental health awareness. My co-creators can contribute to the games in different ways, such as the narrative, the design, the art or the music and sound.
Since graduating from my PhD, I have been pivoting Mental Jam into a social enterprise, because I believe in its potential to help even more people. I joined different incubator programs, such as Creative Cooperative’s Anyone Can, Blackbird Giants, PressPlay, RMIT Activator FounderHub and LaunchHub, and HEX Ho Chi Minh Entrepreneurship Exchange Program sponsored by City of Melbourne.
We are currently developing a new game and looking for more people to make games with us.
