With school becoming remote, we sought to reinstate some of the traditional balance of traditional in-person education. Namely, our goal was to increase the work/life balance for people engaging in these remote opportunities - since these people use the same time, space, and tools for both educational and leisure activities.
Through our research with current remote university students, we learned that taking breaks from coursework has become more difficult and less encouraged than ever before. We found that many students had altogether dropped the habit of taking intentional breaks, in favor of maximizing productivity. Interestingly, we found some inconsistency in the students who were using the no-break strategy: they did not believe using this strategy led to higher levels of productivity, some going as far as guessing the strategy actually decreased the quality of their work.
Similarly, we found through our research with current students that they experienced increased anxiety due to the demands of working remotely; and they also experienced anxiety specifically associated with feeling isolated. Therefore, we aligned our project goals with these problems: (1) students having no defined separation between work and life outside of work, (2) students feeling alone due to the lack of personal connection with classmates as well as friends and family. We chose to create a digital intervention that would be accessible to as wide an audience as we could reach, and eventually settled on a game format.
Combo Crush is a mobile game that is similar to Cards Against Humanity, in that creating the most entertaining combination of cards enables a player to win. In each round, players match an Activity Card with the Context Card the judge chooses. The goal here is to make interesting combinations that your opponent(s) wouldn’t think of, and that the judge will find amusing enough to choose as their favorite. Players can win points by having their combination chosen as well as guessing the card combination that the judge will choose.
Players can also win points by participating in a bonus round where they can upload media showing them actually doing the chosen activity in the accompanying context.
Combo Crush was designed to be a mobile game so that players could stay connected to friends and family in a remote manner. However, all Context Cards are designed such that players are highly likely to have immediate access to these contexts - increasing the likelihood of performing these activities in bonus rounds. The intended outcome for Combo Crush players is to think creatively about activities unrelated to work, and engage in some of these unexpected activity and context pairings with friends and family. We envision consistent Combo Crush players slowly training themselves to engage in healthier break-taking behavior.
We employed a couple embedded design techniques when building Combo Crush. First, we used obfuscation to hide the underlying purpose of the game by framing it as a silly mobile game designed to keep friends and family connected. Additionally, we used the technique of intermixing, so that the content of the game was not obviously related to increasing healthy behaviors by only encouraging self-care activities. The game also made use of silly, whimsical activities designed to simply be fun and fit with the purported purpose of the game. Reactance effects are a well documented finding in the field of persuasive design, which show that if people are aware of an imposed ulterior motive, they will likely act against it.
From our prototype testing, we learned some valuable lessons that greatly informed our hi-fi prototype. First, we found that users reacted negatively to mandatory activities and preferred if it was an optional extra for bonus points. Next, we learned that people had little (but some) interest in playing publicly with strangers - so we centered our design around the Private mode where users are playing against friends and family. Finally, we learned that users wanted the ability to personalize their experience in the game. Thus, we added the capability for users to customize their avatars and acquire card packs that allow users to better customize their combos and express themselves while playing.
The next logical step with Combo Crush is to expand to more demographics beyond remote students, like remote employees for instance. Besides the obvious benefit of reaching a wider audience, having a larger active data pool would allow the game to more quickly find any potentially harmful pairings or patterns in the gameplay. Finally, conducting a series of diary studies would help uncover just how much Combo Crush positively impacts break-taking behavior, if at all. One difficulty with this method is that it relies on people to self-report data, which impacts the quality of the data, and could possibly skew results.
