Abstract

For all its frequency in North American popular culture, wellness media remains a contested product on behalf of public health officials, medical professionals, and designers alike. Central to this debate is whether wellness is a tool for capitalizing on misinformation and passivity, or if it plays a useful role in meeting actual social needs. Within the realm of game studies and design, critiques of emotional games and empathy games have run into similar pitfalls. The shared cultural popularizations of the ‘wellness’ and ‘emotional game’ movements form the starting point of my intersectional, experimental, creation-as-research intervention known as ColorFull, asking: What is the feeling of wellness, and how can one play with that feeling? ‘Wellness’ in this thesis is used as a malleable term for the broad, socially-dependent, and personally-significant factors that influence individual wellbeing.

In this thesis I review ColorFull’s development and public dissemination. The project began with a series of three participatory design workshops, which produced themes that were further developed with Reflective Game Design, Critical Play, Participatory Design, and “Radically Soft” praxis. This in turn helped build a physical card based drawing game, wherein group discussion and sharing promotes individual reflection on the user’s own conceptions of wellness. From testing this work, I created a set of my learned best practices useful for future emotional and/or wellness game designers.