Making Self-Care Fun

How MIT are leveraging game design principles to combat depression

Here’s an unbelievable statistic: there are over 2.5 billion active gamers around the world. With an estimated population of about 7.6 billion people, that means that approximately one third of the entirety of Earth’s population plays games. Long gone are the days of gaming being for the nerds and the geeks of the world; the medium is being welcomed with open arms around the globe.

In 2018, the total gaming market was predicted to be worth around $134.9 billion. To put that into perspective, it’s more than the lifetime gross of the top 20 best selling movies of all time combined, with over $100 billion left to spare. According to Techjury, over 50% of the global games market came from mobile games in 2019. Literal millions of people play these games every day, whether it be jumping into a game of Fortnite or Call of Duty Mobile, or killing time on the bus with some Candy Crush.

So why is it then that within the industry, the term “mobile gaming” is met with collective eye-rolling?

It would seem the fingers can be pointed in multiple directions: mobile games tend to be microtransaction-filled nightmares, they’re purposefully and deceitfully addicting, and they have utterly saturated the market with over 300,000 games…