A screenshot from the game
Finally, after 3.5 years of research and the subsequent hunt for a collaborator, I have previewed a prototype version of the breath-control game at Shift Happens – The Arts, Learning and Technology conference that is held in York every year.
This year’s event was held between July 5-6. I was invited to deliver a brief talk about my work and the organizers very kindly allowed me to preview my game across the two days. We had over 30 people try the game and the vast majority of the response was extremely positive. Perhaps what is most important to me is that most people ‘got’ the objective of the game without getting into tedious explanations. This is what I had been aiming for right from the start. To create a simple, straightforward and intuitive system for breath-awareness and its subsequent control. The game play reinforces the relationship between breath-control and stress-management.
We did have to provide a brief induction, which is to be expected. But the primary instruction to play the game was – Just make the little fishies go away! I never thought i’d spend an entire day telling some very clever people to do this.
