APD Play and Stillness

By Devika Menon

Theme: Play and Stillness

Context

For this week's theme of Stillness, the first thing that came to my mind is Meditation. I was taught yoga and meditation quite early in life, and I have been meditating regularly for about a year now.

The way I started meditating was through guided meditations, and this is super easy now thanks to all the meditation apps that exist. Apps like Headspace, Calm, Breethe, and more have made mindfulness completely accessible to anyone.

In the game space, there are quite a few creative games these days that encourage mindfulness. An example is PLAYNE: The Meditation Game by developer Krish Shrikumar. In the game, the world grows and transforms with your mindfulness. It has 3 game modes that offer a variety of ways to explore meditation and you can even unlock a massive open-world island to explore and grow large forests.

For this week I thought it would be fun to create a concept for a game app that encourages meditation by giving the users an end goal to focus on, motivating them to stick to the habit while making it fun.

Method

I designed a simple UI for a game app that is based on the concept of growing a tree based on a daily meditation practice. The idea is to have one guided meditation per day, and as the user checks in for a meditation every day, they get to grow a new tree or plant each day.

Since I am not well versed in coding and also due to time constraints, I only designed the visuals of the app and did not make an end product.

Response

Meditation Tree: Growing your mindful tree with your daily meditation practice

Features

Game world with a plant each day that grows and transforms with your mindfulness
Each day offers a different guided meditation, such as Gratitude, Loving Kindness, Breath exercises, etc.
Grow a tree each day and create your own tranquil space
Build a habit of meditation by checking in daily.

Reflection

Since I am not well versed in coding and also due to time constraints, I only designed the visuals of the app and did not make an end product. But despite that I am quite happy with the end result that I came up with.

In today's world mindfulness is extremely important, and with the pandemic and lockdowns thrown into the mix, meditation and introspection is necessary now more than ever. It can be incredibly helpful to have a grounding practice that can ease daily anxieties even just a little bit. Meditation not only reduces stress but also improves health, promotes better sleep, slows aging, and increases overall sense of wellbeing.

But the major problem that people face is that they can't seem to just sit down and meditate, to "tame the monkey mind", so to speak. I believe that a game like this can be somewhat helpful for people who face that issue. It is proven that people are more responsible and committed when it comes to caring for something, such as the Tamagotchi or Virtual Pets. By encouraging people to check in daily so that they can grow their tree, it will give them more of an incentive to listen to a guided meditation every day, while having a fun activity to do and maintaining their streak.