A co-present, group-based affective game that helps adults practice emotional intelligence with the friends they already have.
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A co-present, group-based affective game that helps adults practice emotional intelligence with the friends they already have.
We spend more time than ever in digital environments — and less time face-to-face. That shift has begun to erode the social-emotional muscles adults rely on to maintain healthy relationships: identifying what we feel, putting it into words, and trusting friends with the parts of ourselves that feel risky to share.
Most affective computing tools designed to help with this are aimed at children, target individuals or two-person dyads, and live entirely online. Very few are designed for the messy, in-person, group-shaped reality of adult friendships, where so much of our emotional life actually happens.
StEMory was built to fill that gap.
StEMory is a hybrid affective interface — part digital game, part conversation scaffold — that small groups of friends play together in the same room. The system uses emotionally complex visual stimuli (images that mix multiple emotions, e.g., 30% happy, 30% sadness, 40% calm), paired with structured prompts that guide each player through a four-step cycle:
The design draws directly from Social Penetration Theory and Social Exchange Theory: relationships deepen when disclosure is reciprocal, when vulnerability is rewarded with empathy, and when the cost of opening up feels matched by the value returned. StEMory turns those abstract principles into concrete game mechanics.
Twelve groups of friends — 36 adults total played StEMory in a single ~45-minute session.
After a single ~45-minute session, friends felt meaningfully closer to one another, and became markedly more willing to share difficult emotions — jealousy, fear, anxiety, and sadness — that people usually keep to themselves. In their own words, players described feeling safer, more understood, and ready to keep the conversations going long after the game ended.
The takeaway is simple: closeness always requires some risk, but technology can structure the safety that makes the risk feel worth taking.
Future work will explore long-term effects through repeated sessions, cross-cultural adaptations. The team also working on potential deployment of StEMory in nursing homes to foster connection and closeness between the residence.