Swatee Surve interview: Showing gratitude to your friends in a game

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Swatee Surve has been working on games that can improve mental health for more than 10 years. She is still at it, and she has added a new minigame called Gratitude to the mobile game platform that she launched a decade ago to help patients manage problems such as stress, anxiety, or depression.

Starting in 2012, Litesprite created a game called Sinasprite, which used a fox character named Socks to go on journeys through an animated world. I wrote about the company years ago and caught up with Surve at the recent DICE Summit event in Las Vegas.

In contrast to many action games, the journeys that Socks takes players on are soothing or relaxing. Surve said her company has become adept at measuring the impact of the game on the behavior and health of its players, and it has clinical findings that support the notion that it helps people cope.

Ohio State University’s peer-reviewed analysis determined Sinasprite delivered a “clinically relevant improvement,” which meant a player was productive two more days each week than before the intervention (i.e., playing Sinasprite).

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Recent internal findings showed that within six weeks that 34% of users reported a clinically relevant improvement; 19% of users reported a minimally clinically important difference (MCID) in anxiety;