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How might we design healthy, inclusive digital spaces that enable individuals and communities to thrive?


Plot Twisters: Online game world for nurturing self-reflection and emotional literacy

by Jenny Liu Zhang

Founder, Managing Director
Plot Twisters
Submission Date
November 01, 2022


OVERVIEW

We’re a co-design collective of 22 designers, researchers, artists, and technologists passionate about the power of digital tools to help us better understand ourselves and build our journeys toward wellbeing. As women and non-binary POC, we observe firsthand how many existing online experiences don’t intentionally support healthy self-awareness, especially with respect to different backgrounds, learning styles, and trauma exposures. Since 2020, we’ve been creating Plot Twisters, an immersive online game for nurturing emotional literacy, personal narrative building, and self-advocacy skills in young people, so they can learn to compassionately self-regulate and critically contribute to their communities in consensual, strengths-based ways, in both reality and virtuality.

Our name Plot Twisters comes from the idea that all people encounter "plot twists," or challenges and conflicts, as we navigate life. The Plot Twisters game world will be one digital destination for regulating emotions, becoming mindful of cognitive patterns, and discovering strategies that align with our values during life’s plot twists. Over the last three years, we have partnered with Georgia State University’s EMPOWER Lab, Oxford University’s Connected Life, University of Colorado Boulder’s Media Design Lab, United Nations Internet Governance Forum, The Honest Majority, Orthogonal Research and Education Lab, Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, and Let’s Talk LD to research and prototype gameplay components that are trauma-informed and accessible for diverse neurotypes and cultural backgrounds in English-speaking countries. Plot Twisters will help nourish the following skills:

  • Discovery and expression of our needs, values, and expectations

  • Self-compassion and self-acceptance

  • Mindfulness and emotional regulation and relaxation

  • Introspection on how our values connect to our experiences, goals, and life narratives

  • Prosocial, emotionally literate, and trauma-informed communication

  • Awareness of power differentials and distorted narratives in social systems

  • Facilitation of non-coercive structures in communities

  • Respect for all walks of life to consent to, engage with, and collaborate in mutual care

The game is a first-person experience set in “Twisterland,” a world where the emotional states and thought patterns of its residents affect its natural landscape, including the weather and the plant life. To live harmoniously with their landscape, residents prioritize personal and community care, and all of Twisterland’s cultural, labor, and governance structures are built around these priorities. Plot Twisters immerses you, a visitor to Twisterland, into the world’s 10 neighborhoods, guided by non-player animal characters with their own quirky backstories and self-narratives. The game world is playable individually and socially, and each location is dedicated to a different topic in self-regulation and wellbeing, from emotional awareness to role model discovery.

 

Proposed MVP

So far, our partnerships have enabled us to prototype components of our game world, from minigames to visuospatial metaphors and play mechanics. We most recently debuted our map of Twisterland at Oxford University’s Connected Life Conference, and exhibited the basis of our in-game reflection prompts, a deck of 48 “Storytelling Cards,” at the United Nations Internet Governance Forum. If selected as a top proposal, our prize money would go toward creating the Plot Twisters MVP, which will integrate and build upon these existing components. We will build our MVP in steps to test and discover our impact and desirability iteratively:

  1. Twisterland design fiction

    • How might we model a world where the labor, cultural, and governance structures are built around prioritizing personal and community care so players are inspired to think critically about their social structures on Earth?

  2. Game navigation and activity mapping

    • How might we introduce the self-reflection topics in the game so players can easily find the kind of self-regulation practice they need at the moment for both therapeutic and “just for fun” use cases?

  3. Sentiment analysis and social simulation using Storytelling Cards

    • How might we weave a player’s lived experience on Earth into their experience of Twisterland so the social-emotional skills they learn immersively in Twisterland can transfer meaningfully back into the real world?

  4. Character scripts

    • How might we demonstrate diverse ways of communicating and relating to the world through non-player characters so players of all neurotypes, cultural backgrounds, and trauma exposures can find belonging in the storyworld and feel comfortable returning?

  5. Game artwork and soundtrack

    • How might we create a rich visual and auditory aesthetic that nurtures playfulness, comfort, and enthusiasm about Twisterland’s storyworld so players of all energy levels are intrigued to return?

  6. Branching narrative game experience

    • How might we combine all the above components into a plot-driven yet personalizable and repeatable experience so players can engage with Plot Twisters regularly across both short and long gameplay sessions (10 minutes to 2 hours)?

Potential partners for MVP research, playtesting, and/or creative collaboration: Edinburgh Futures Institute, The EMPOWER Lab, Let’s Talk LD, Orthogonal Research and Education Lab, The Honest Majority, and Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute.

OpenIDEO can help us coalesce our years of co-design and research into something cohesive: a branching narrative experience that breaks the fourth wall through reflection activities, journaling minigames, and characters that can challenge players to think meaningfully about their lives. Beyond being an imaginative browser-based game world available freely online, Plot Twisters can augment therapists and counselors during mental health interventions for youth, educators supporting neurodiverse and otherwise marginalized students to reflect on and advocate for their needs, and social-emotional learning and conflict communication in schools. A story about how self-reflection and regulation is a lifelong journey, players can return to Plot Twisters again and again, and when they’re ready, head back to Earth each time more prepared to address their plot twists.


PURPOSE

Plot Twisters will empower young people to understand their self-narratives and, in turn, emerge collective human flourishing from the bottom up. Our research demonstrates that by equipping individuals with the self-knowledge skills to navigate their values and needs in life, they are more prepared to communicate clearly, negotiate their expectations, and engage in emotionally literate dialogue with others, which can contribute to healthy, prosocial communities. Furthermore, by supporting people from an early age to be aware of the strengths, roles, and lived experiences they bring to their social environments, we can shape future generations to think critically, empathetically, and intersectionally about the world’s toughest problems. We see this work as both a reactive intervention to healing through interpersonal and systemic violence, as well as a preemptive project because it facilitates the self-advocacy practices that build and sustain community health.

Achieving this purpose requires the participation of as many people as possible, so our storytelling and interface design celebrates and centers diverse bodies and minds. Plot Twisters aims to highlight the ways that marginalized and disabled people’s wellbeing is excluded by many environments on Earth, and suggests alternatives. In Twisterland, diverse life experiences and narratives are empathized with instead of being treated as lesser or broken, and this is built into game mechanisms that model anti-oppressive, needs-literate dialogue. Our storylines will involve characters coded or explicitly with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), limited mobility, and other personal impairments or socialized barriers, and Twisterland itself will be a speculative imagining of how infrastructure and public spaces can serve young, old, and disabled bodies. 

As a product of our own co-design community’s needs, our game accommodates learning differences, prioritizes readability for young and non-native English speakers, and includes different communication modalities, with at least visual, verbal, and auditory engagement to start. By introducing a world that is attuned to people's vulnerabilities and lived experiences, we hope our game inspires both online and offline futures where all people, no matter their perceived limits, have their needs accommodated and are proactively included into society’s narratives and institutions.

QUESTIONS

We’re a co-design collective of designers, researchers, artists, and technologists. We build tools as a community of practice for self-reflection from diverse walks of life, neurotypes, and cultural backgrounds. We also operate as a strengths-focused mutual aid organization when we have members in physical, financial, or emotional need.

Cleveland, OH

USA

Nurturing future generations with playful, accessible, and lifelong practices for emotional regulation and personal narrative building.

What: One way to lay the foundations for healthy, sustainable communities is to support their young people to reflect on and communicate their experiences by:

  • Teaching from a young age that emotional regulation, needs literacy, and self-advocacy are preemptive and lifelong practices for wellbeing.

  • Augmenting self-care, introspection, and self-discovery practices through repeatable online reflection activities.

  • Supporting reactive efforts for wellbeing through trauma-informed dialogue with characters in Twisterland and real-life friends in the game’s social mode.

Why: Through a storyworld of minigames and reflection exercises, players will learn to embody self-reflection and social-emotional learning skills, then be encouraged to apply these skills to their everyday lives, with immediate applications for:

  • Youth mental health interventions.

  • Culturally-sensitive and trauma-focused therapy.

  • Disabled and neurodivergent students.

  • Social-emotional learning in classrooms.

  • People whose main ways of learning and relating to others are digital, e.g. homebound and disabled people.

  • Restorative and transformative justice practices.

  • Conflict communication and mediation in schools and workplaces.

How: To achieve this aim, we have developed game components with our organizational partners based on the following frameworks:

  1. Goal 1: 10,000 active monthly users. Plot Twisters will be an online-first resource with a target audience of young people aged 10–18. Our initial KPI will be to reach 10,000 active monthly users through word of mouth and intentional relationships with our organizational partners and networks. Like popular browser-based games including Neopets and Club Penguin, our game world will be accessible from any web, tablet, or mobile device.

  2. Goal 2: Custom integration into 50% of schools and youth programs in English-speaking countries. In addition to being openly available online, we want to implement a go-to-market strategy in the education space, both curricular and/or extracurricular. Our second KPI will be customizing our games and tools for integration into 50% of schools in the countries our co-design team is located in: the US, UK, and Australia (~50,000 schools in the US, ~10,000 schools in the UK, and ~5,000 schools in Australia). We want Plot Twisters to be the designated mental health and self-reflection tool to augment youth-facing therapists and career counselors.

  3. Goal 3: Multimodal and multilingual expansion. Plot Twisters will be primarily designed for internet-connected devices at first, but we would like to create analog versions of our game experiences in the form of tabletop activities and story books to reach audiences that may not be best served digitally. Similarly, though Plot Twisters will focus on English-speaking users at launch, our team is multilingual and interested in developing versions for other languages as well, like Spanish and Mandarin. Through these expansions, we hope to make Plot Twisters accessible beyond online communities and schools via local meetups, public libraries, and community centers.

English-speaking communities, starting with where our co-design team is located in the USA, UK, and Australia; networks of our partnering organizations, educational institutions, and civic nonprofits; online communities of our team members, including forums and Discord and Slack interest groups
  1. Young people (ages 10–18) navigating self-knowledge and interpersonal skills. Adolescence is a time of new experiences and change, and young people need both reactive and preemptive strategies for understanding their roles in relationships and environments. Plot Twisters’ focus on playful social-emotional education can be a resource they revisit to practice regulation and reflection whenever they encounter growing pains, challenges, and conflicts. In 2022, we have already tested our Storytelling Cards through moderated focus groups to research how young people currently conceive of their feelings, needs, and values.

  2. Marginalized people seeking therapy and special needs support. Our tools are designed for the inclusion of neurodiverse, disabled, and trauma-exposed people whose needs may not be accommodated by existing institutions and environments. Plot Twisters can equip people to understand their wellbeing needs, then provide emotionally-literate strategies to advocate for those needs. For instance, neurodiverse students may need different learning modalities; a person navigating PTSD may require environmental accommodations to feel safe. Plot Twisters has already developed self-reflection worksheets with our partners to support students to track their needs and communicate them to their communities.

  3. Counselors and therapists. Caregivers require a variety of culturally-sensitive and trauma-informed strategies to provide effective interventions, especially if they’re serving people of diverse backgrounds. Plot Twisters integrates several evidence-based psychotherapy frameworks including TF-CBT; through our branching narrative interface, people and their caregivers can find the activities that work best for them.

We expect to fund the following:

  • Supporting our volunteer team ($10,000). Our team of 22 is completely volunteer-driven, and a few of our members are disabled and/or in need of financial assistance for healthcare, therapy, and schooling. We convene once per week to synthesize research and collaborate on game design synchronously; the rest of the week, we conduct research activities, literature reviews, and technical and creative outputs asynchronously. To finish our initial game spec and begin our MVP roadmap, we would like to compensate our members on a modest hourly basis for the time they contribute to the project, based on their needs.

  • Creating the MVP ($35,000). After we complete the game spec this winter, we would like to compensate people in our network to create and/or advise our MVP. Our MVP will require the following:

    • Browser-based game development

    • Game illustrations

    • Soundtrack and sound effects

    • Playtesting research and focus groups
  • Tooling and operating expenses ($5,000):

    • Copyrights and trademarks

    • Figma license

    • Fonts and artistic assets

    • Game design software

    • Digital infrastructure, e.g. web hosting

We’d appreciate advice from product leaders on what parts of the game we should monetarily invest in and execute on first. We’d love to be put in touch with people who have previously created interdisciplinary and evidence-based experiences for support on planning our roadmap and gauging our resource distribution over the next 3 years.

To sustain, Plot Twisters will need:

  • An ongoing core team that manages and maintains our research, co-design processes, and the game’s technical build. Roles might center around:

    • Research

    • Web and mobile engineering

    • Game asset creation

    • Sound design

    • Code contribution

    • Marketing

    • Content development, e.g. role model interviews

  • An implementation team to distribute and scale our product:

    • Program managers for school districts

    • Program managers for community organizations and youth programs


  November 01, 2022

  1725 VIEWS

  10 LIKES

  10 Followers

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Challenge Journey

Proposal Submission
Completed
2. Review
Completed
Proposal Refinement
Completed
4. Final Review
Completed
Top Proposals
Dec 6, 2022
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Comments
10
Medha Tare

Thank you so much for sharing this great work!  One question I have is how long does game-play take - is it continuous or do players "finish" the modules at some point?  How do the skills youth gain transfer to other contexts?  In an ideal world, what could you measure to show that long-term impact?

Cat Chang

Hi Medha! Thank you for posting such thoughtful questions (: As someone who has seen this idea evolve significantly, here's my 2 cents: 

"How long does game-play take - is it continuous or do players 'finish' the modules at some point?"

This one has the most concrete answer (for now)... both! Initially, new players play a game with a curated story that we intend to design like a TV show - 24 episodes that should take players ~30-60 minutes/episode to complete. Relatively short for both a video game or a TV show! This story guides them through all of Twisterland's locations to get to know Twisterland and its kin (non-playing characters). But, after players complete the story, they can revisit locations and non-playing characters when they want to repeat or revisit self-reflection activities in the game. 

"How do the skills youth gain transfer to other contexts?"

The most accurate answer is - how we will design game dynamics to ensure skills transfer to other contexts is a gap in our understanding that we hope to learn through prototyping and iteration. We know that the self-reflection games we plan to implement in the game so far (see "How" under "Intended Impact Elaboration") are backed by research in trauma-focused therapies for youth, design activities emphasising play, prosocial communication practices and mutual aid. We know games from these disciplines can spark meaningful change in folks - we hope, at the very least, the game exposes youth to playful activities that they can refer back to, repeat or revisit in Twisterland (or on Earth) when needed.

"In an ideal world, what could you measure to show that long-term impact?"

The most accurate answer is vague - we still have yet to figure this out and we'll distill it as we develop the idea further! I know that overall, Plot Twisters' want young people to feel confident navigating the "plot twists" in their life - we see this as confidence and self-assurance in:

  • Knowing personal values
  • Identifying emotions
  • Expressing and communicating emotions
  • Navigating conflict 
  • Setting boundaries
  • Understanding when to ask for help

It's been difficult for us to think about metrics for this, especially cross-culturally. For long-term impact, I personally think about reduction of loneliness in youth and young adults as a way to measure if an individual feels like they have fulfilling relationships and lives (I refer to the UK government's Loneliness Action Plan and A Biography of Loneliness by Fay Bound-Alberti, which includes a bit more cross-cultural and trauma-related research). 

 

Hope this answers your questions honestly, if even a bit vague! 

Rhys Southan

I felt calm and nourished as I read about Plot Twisters. At one point, I was reminded of The Ungame and the story behind it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ungame). The Ungame itself was very different from Plot Twisters. It was much simpler and purely social; it didn't create an imaginative new world or offer space for internal reflection and self-regulation as Plot Twisters will. The connection I'm seeing has to do with the story behind the game and the mutual recognition that there are emotional needs being either ignored or unaddressed and certainly unresolved, and the desire to help through a game that is patiently designed with care and concern. It will be very exciting to see when it's even more developed, but it's comforting just to know a team of people has come together to work on something like this.

Jesse Parent

In a world such as this, with so much pressure turning away from narratives of meaning, away from the interwoven threads of individuals across generations and circumstance, this project offers something worthy of hope. It shows what we can choose to build, even if it is fragile and requires care. The folks around these efforts are a wonderful bunch. There's a lot of plot to twist. 

Aditya Aggarwal

I was introduced to Plot Twisters 3 years back, and I am quite glad is substantially matured my approach to life. Concepts I learnt like the Cookie Trail (a detailed visual framework through which to understand a life journey) and hats (a metaphor for different roles you play through life) have stuck with me as maps to come back to I navigate my present day journey. K-12 school, college, and work all focus on your intellectual capacity, but never hone skills of introspection, life-planning, and self-awareness. Getting these right is a big part of being a functioning, mentally healthy adult, making Plot Twisters compelling to people of all walks of life. 

Bansini Doshi

I was introduced to Plot Twisters about a year ago by a friend - really love the work you're all doing here :) Also, its nice to see work by fellow IYA alumns out in the wild!