Players, Take (Self-)Care: Bringing Humanistic Psychology into a Game Jam about Mental Health

Abstract

Game jams are collective events that bring people together to think about, make and play games. As collaborative encounters built on community, game jams create unique interpersonal possibilities. Tapping into this relational potential, we integrated elements of humanistic psychology and the person-centred approach into a game jam: We engaged 19 participants in the making of games for self-care and mental health, over the course of a week, as a remote event hosted by the National Videogame Museum, UK. We go on to thematically analyse our shared discussions to unpack the jam as a mutual sense-making activity between facilitators and participants, demonstrating how the jam functioned as a space in which the status quo of mental health could be negotiated; contributing to the jam’s sense of community, and generation of caring, novel designs. Finally, we outline two design opportunities for game designers, developers and researchers that seek to engage with the experiential nature of game jams care-fully.