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Paradise Island: A Game that Rewards You for Improving Your Mental Health Skills

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Guardians Project

Guardians Project 

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Guardians Project

The Newest Mental Health Game from the MIT Media Lab is Here!

The hit mental health game series The Guardians from the MIT Media Lab is back, with the all new, completely free game, Paradise Island!

Paradise Island is a unique mobile game that asks players to build up their mental health skills by sending them on their own real life adventures in exchange for in-game rewards! Get in-game pets and items for improving your own wellbeing and living a better life. It’s really just that simple!

Please get more information and try out the game yourself at https://guardians.media.mit.edu/

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Guardians Project

Based on Real World Data

We are driven by our desire to use in-game rewards to motivate and encourage people to take care of their mental health. That's why, in April 2020, we launched our first game, Unite the Realms, to great success. We have shown (https://ieee-cog.org/2021/assets/papers/paper_185.pdf) that Unite the Realms increased long term retention rates to a behavioral activation therapy regimen by over 2.5 times compared to the top mental health apps. Not only that, over 80% of daily real life adventures actively helped the players improve their mood! The game has been so successful, it was declared the winner of the Fast Company Innovation by Design Award for the Wellness category and finalist for Apps & Games.

Now, based on the feedback we've received and data we've analyzed, we're back with our brand new and improved sequel, Paradise Island! Explore this wondrous and dangerous new island while collecting brand new pets and unlocking brand new activities and sights.

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Guardians Project

Improved Gameplay

In Paradise Island, it's up to you to save the island from its ongoing calamities by doing real world wellness activities to inspire pets to join your cause. Once they've joined you, you must carefully use your resources to send them on missions and level up their skills, so they can perform the difficult magics required to save their island and their Guardian. The hit strategy-based gameplay returns, with many quality of life updates and a brand new minigame! In Catch the Fruit, you can toss your pets freely into the air to collect fruits you will need on your quest!

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Guardians Project

Established Psychology That Really Works!

Of course, Paradise Island doesn’t ask you to do just any old real life activity for rewards. We use a streamlined version of the well-established and highly successful therapy known as Behavioral Activation. It’s basically the “secret sauce” of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and it’s designed to pull people out of an anhedonic depressive spiral. Normally, people with anhedonia are prevented from accurately predicting whether meaningful activities will make them feel better, so they end up lying in bed doing nothing and thus feeling worse and worse. And that’s where we come in: Paradise Island gives players the push they need to get up and break the spiral.

Essentially, Paradise Island prompts players to get up and do something that’s meaningful to them in order to get in-game rewards. Then, once they do that activity, they’re prompted to reflect on how it made them feel, to help them realize that it did, in fact, make them feel better, despite what their anhedonia made them believe. This helps players break out of anhedonic spirals, and it helps teach skills that can prevent future depressive episodes!

Paradise Island comes with 75 suggested activities, hand-picked by top therapists and psychology experts, or users can also choose their own custom activities if they prefer. We’re here to provide the motivation to get up, prevent or break out of depressive loops, and start feeling better!

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About The Guardians Project

The Guardians Project is part of the Affective Computing Group at the MIT Media Lab. Our goal is to use in-game rewards to help people to get motivated to live better lives. All of our apps and games are always 100% free to everyone.

We never sell anyone’s data or profit from users in any way. Our apps collect completely anonymized gameplay data so we can offer cloud save backups to our users, and so we are able to publicly publish our aggregate results and help others build similar platforms. We always publicly publish our methodology and results so others can build on our work and learn how to best use in-game rewards to truly help people in need.

For more information, please read our privacy policy at https://guardians.media.mit.edu/privacy/ or email us at guardians@media.mit.edu

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Guardians Project

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