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Games have the potential to not only entertain and immerse people, but can be used as vehicles for meaning-making. Given these qualities, games are approached as inspiration for caring technologies, especially for mental health. This transformative process often prioritises learning from games as systems, but not necessarily from the experiences of people with mental distress who play games for self-care. In this paper, we report on a participatory workshop series that sets out to further illuminate the connection between games, self-care and mental health from a humanistic, person-centred perspective. Over four workshops, we engaged 16 people with experiences of mental distress in speculative making activities and discussions of how self-care technology inspired by games could be re-envisioned. By thematically analysing our discussions and collective sense-making, we showcase how participants actively "re-frame" games for self-care. Finally, we sketch out how game developers and makers of gameful self-care technologies could build on our findings.

Background: Mental health literacy is important as it relates to understanding mental illness, increasing help-seeking efficacy, and reducing mental illness-related stigma. One method to improve the mental health literacy of young people is a digital video intervention. Aims: A scoping review was conducted to map existing research in the area of digital video interventions for mental health literacy among young people. Methods: The scoping review was conducted following the PRISMA-ScR checklist. All results were screened based on our inclusion criteria. Results: Seventeen studies were selected for analysis. In most studies (n = 14), a digital video was the only intervention whereas three studies took a multi-intervention approach. Only two of the digital video interventions were co-created with people with mental illness or university students. All studies showed positive results in favor of digital video interventions in at least one component of mental health literacy or compared to one of the comparison conditions. Conclusions: Digital video interventions represent effective tools for enhancing mental health literacy. However, there is a need for active involvement of end-users in co-creation and to attend to the production quality so that the digital video intervention is as relevant, informed, and effective as possible.

Data is seen as the ‘new oil’ that drives the digital economy, and museums are no exception to this. We investigate how data captured from hybrid museum experiences can become a resource for designers, for museums, and for visitors in their understanding of a museum and a museum visit. We ground our discussion in three complementary case studies: Analysing visitors’ movements in a touring virtual reality exhibition called Thresholds; analysing their gifting behaviours in the Gift app; and capturing data about how designers used our Visitor Box cards.

Self-care apps offer a wide variety of different therapy paradigms, pedagogies and concepts for people to maintain and make sense of their mental health. However, as human-made artefacts, these apps are being imbued with their designers’ interests, opinions, biases and assumptions about self-care. This paper is interested in making these (often) implicit notions visible. After selecting 69 apps from the Google Play Store, we use Feminist Content Analysis to investigate the store descriptions of these apps: Inductively through thematic analysis and deductively through charting concepts found within the descriptions. Our findings indicate that commercial self-care apps portray themselves as “future creating” tools for individual self-discovery, but they also create narratives that propagate an overly simplistic, individualistic and potentially harmful view of mental distress. We conclude this paper by sketching out alternative design considerations for how self-care apps can portray themselves and communicate in a more transparent, plurality-embracing fashion.

This paper reports on an ethnomethodology-informed ethnography of a video game museum. Based on 4 weeks of ethnographic fieldwork, we showcase how groups of visitors to the museum achieved the interactional work necessary to play games together and organise a museum visit as a social unit. By showcasing and explication excerpts of museums visits we make the "taken-for-granted" nature of these interactions visible. Embedded within an activity map that outlines how people "prepare", "play", "wind down" and "exit" games, we showcase the sequential, temporal, and carefully negotiated character of these visits. Based on our findings and the resulting "Machinery of Interaction", we propose three design implications for spaces that aim to exhibit video games and/or try to facilitate co-located, collective video game play.