Evaluation of a mindfulness game

Quantified Self Research & Media
1

Hi everyone,

I have developed a mindfulness game, as part of my PhD research, and seek participants who would like to playtest it. The interaction between digital games and mindfulness, and how games can improve and assess (/quantify) mindfulness, is to date largely untouched by scientific research, which is why your feedback would be key to advance this endeavor.

You can play the game in your desktop browser (please use Chrome or Firefox only), which takes 15 min to complete, excl. 3 short questionnaires before and after playing.

To take part please visit www.mindfulgaming.org/improve

Thank you!

2

I tried itl I answered the questionnaire and played the game for a while. I stopped after about 10 minutes (135 breaths) because I wasn’t sure how long it was going to keep going and I didn’t have very much more time. It looked like there were some glitches in the game. For instance, the counters were thrown off if I make a small mistake such as pressing the exhale key and releasing for a second before continuing to press. I don’t think I learned very much from doing this, but perhaps my trial will help you somehow.

3

Thank you very much for testing.

The pure game takes 15 minutes, which is indicated by a progress indicator left to the score.

4

I really enjoyed testing the game, I’d be curious to see a paper when there are results from your research.

There were some aspects of the UX that felt rough around the edges, but I’m not certain whether they’re by design (to produce feelings of confusion or annoyance in the user), so it’s hard to give feedback.

A few examples:

  • In one part of the game the screen gets so dark that you can’t read the sign posts for which you’re supposed to select your answer (by moving left/right). My response in that portion can’t be used for analysis since I didn’t know what the left/right poles indicated.
  • The space every 10 breaths timing was counter-intuitive. Even after the training period I hadn’t fully understood when to press the key, and it wasn’t clear I was failing until I started accidentally getting it right later on.
  • There’s an alignment problem on the final questionnaire where the text sometimes took two rows and thus wasn’t matchable with the checkboxes anymore.

Overall, really interesting project and implementation.

5

Thanks Jeremy for taking the time to play the game and provide me with feedback!

I will address your points in the next version, which will be hopefully more polished as well :slight_smile: