For 10 years, back in the Philippines and Taiwan I worked as a programmer encouraging players to spend real money on virtual items and tricking them into clicking on ads. I wasn’t contributing anything meaningful to the world and it was utterly unfulfilling.
I’m not saying that games are bad, I’ve spent a lot of my time playing them. My favourite game is The Sims, and at one point in time, I was more invested in my Sims lives than I was in mine. My Sims max out all their skills and are so successful at their jobs that a helicopter comes to pick them up to work. Anyway, so I love video games, and I love its potential. It’s not like reading a book or watching a movie, because its interactive and its immersive. As a player, you control the characters, you are the one moving the story forward.
In 2016, I quit my job and I moved to the other side of the world, UK, to study video game design. While I was there, I realised that this was my opportunity to do something meaningful and to work on something that I didn’t need to worry about selling or making it into the Top Ten of the AppStore. 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.
I grew up in the traditional Chinese family in the Philippines, which happens to be the only Catholic country in Asia, so we don’t talk about mental health, because we believe that our problems can be solved with a prayer. There was a stigma around mental illness, they called it a rich people disease, not because rich people are the only ones who get depressed, but because they are the only ones who can afford therapy. In the Maslow pyramid of needs, when most people are struggling to put food on the table and a roof over their heads, mental health is not their priority. But everyone has mental health in the same way as physical health, its not something that we can just ignore.
When I get anxious, I feel this enormous weight on my chest and I can’t breathe, when I am depressed, I feel incapable of doing anything, I just want to stay in bed and sleep my life away. But when I was living back home, I would just suck it up, put on a smile and pretend that everything was okay. 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.
With one group of research participants, we made a game called Counter Attack Therapy in which sees a humanoid cat named Alex who is struggling with depression following a series of unfortunate events. With another group of participants, we made Amour de Soi in which an anxious girl learns to love herself following a break-up. With another group, we made Anyo in which you play as a caterpillar in a black and white world and you have to defeat monsters to bring colour back into your world. With another group, we made Meowch, which also stars humanoid cats (they’re clearly popular), but this time, we used sound design to trigger authentic feelings of anxiety. For RMIT’s Creative Wellbeing Festival, I worked with a group of students to make Life in Progress, a gamified planner, where instead of having a check box for the to do list, it’s a progress bar, because sometimes, when you don’t complete a task, you feel like you didn’t accomplish anything, but that’s not true, because little progress is still progress!!! All of the games I have helped create tap into reminding people about their strengths even during the darkest of times.
My games are released online and have been played by thousands of people, and I have presented these games at the Big Anxiety Festival and talked about my research at different conferences, such as PAX and Games for Change Festival. I have received touching feedback from participants saying how they felt heard and appreciated through the creation of my video games, who were then able to go on and share their stories with more people and help others better understand depression and anxiety or make people with depression and anxiety feel less alone. Another participant imagined her mind like a drawer, where she would put all her bad experiences in then lock it away and never talk about it again. But through co-creating the game, it made her realize that not everything bad that happened in the past has to be bad, with the right strategies it can turn it into something positive and then inspire other people.
Aside from my PhD, I’ve also been volunteering with batyr, a preventative mental health organisation, as well as the RMIT Wellbeing Team, to organise campaigns and events at RMIT to promote mental health awareness and social connections for university students.
When I think of the word Revolution, I think of big change, like overthrowing the colonisers or inventing something that makes everyone’s lives better. Now that I almost finished my PhD journey (I’m planning to submit in February, fingers crossed I stop procrastinating and get it done), but I still wonder if I am contributing to the world or changing the world in a big way.
What I do know is that I have made a small difference to some people and that’s priceless. Imagine if we all believed we had the power to make a small difference and that we were capable of anything. I wonder how big a difference this would make in the world.
Michelle Chen 