This free research event is a week-long game jam (a community event in which people make games together). This event is a collaboration between the National Videogame Museum and PhD researchers at the University of Nottingham, Velvet Spors and Imo Kaufman.
We are looking for people who would like to explore mental health and self-care in an inclusive, experimental community space, through and with games.
As part of Velvet’s PhD with the NVM, Velvet organised a community group of people who enjoy games and have their own experiences with mental health: Nadia, Nix, Hanne, H R, Danielle, Christine, DAMLA, Imo, Vanessa, Jo, Jenn, Anonymous, Willow, Anonymous and Gisela. Throughout four workshops, we collected thoughts, discussed inspiration and dreamt up playful, critical and compassionate ideas for how self-care technologies, like apps, could be different: What do games offer in themselves that could be used for self-care? What could other mental health technologies learn from games?
Out of this process came the Our Caring Systems toolkit. It is a colorful mix of self-paced activities, like prompts to think about, that (hopefully) can inspire and inform.
This game jam will give everybody who joins access to the first version of this toolkit: Does it work? What needs to be changed? Let’s find out, together.