2023 Video Game Innovations EVERYONE Should Copy

2. Gamifying Mental Health In An Engaging Way - Voidpet Garden

For years, studios have been trying to find a way to make mobile apps more engaging. A handful have also decided to forgo the insidious path of overwhelming microtransactions and misleading trailers and actually try to do some good by addressing mental health. In our current world riddled with plenty of things to generate anxiety, there’s a huge market for an app that actually combines the joy of video games and the productivity of mental health care in one package.

Enter Voidpet Garden, a kind of Pokemon-esque experience where you grow your pets and the trees in your garden by doing things like meditating, setting goals, or naming your emotions.

The gamification stands above traditional self care apps because growing the things in your garden is something you actually want to do, so the mental health aspects come along more naturally. There are a handful of things you can do every day that help grow your roster and your plants and eventually you can battle with your pets as well. There are plenty of mental health apps just as there are plenty of creature collecting apps, but it’s rare to see the two collide in a way that is genuinely both supportive in a useful and non-patronising way while being enjoyable enough to continue to persist with.

While we don’t expect every game to focus on self care, it’s a clever innovation to see one of the apps that does ensure that it actually features gameplay mechanics that keep its players coming back on their own merit.