Project Vision

Vision Statement

Wholesome Haven is a self-care gaming app designed for anyone who struggles to complete self-care tasks. Self-care tasks include everyday practices that support physical, mental, and emotional health… such as brushing your teeth, drinking water, journaling, stretching, or eating a balanced diet. These are small but essential actions that help people recharge and maintain balance. People have a hard time performing self-care tasks for various reasons: they have trouble remembering to do the tasks, are unmotivated, or don’t know what the best self-care tasks are. Our app, Wholesome Haven, emphasizes self-care while using gaming elements, helping users stay motivated and healthy in an engaging way. This app will allow users to interact with friendly, non-player characters to receive “quests.” Each quest corresponds to a real-world self-care task, connecting the concept of a “task” with the familiar gaming mechanic of a “quest.” Based on completion of these quests, users will receive rewards, such as new plants in a garden, a new character moving in for the player to interact with, or items to decorate their house.

To ensure the self-care tasks are effective, they will be chosen based on research from books and scholarly journal articles. One article that can be used to direct research is Gamification for Health and Wellbeing: A Systematic Review of the Literature by Johnson et al. which examines gamification in the context of technology such as websites or apps. The amount of new gameplay available in a day will be limited to prevent overuse of the app. At the end of the day, this application is aimed at promoting familiarity with and practice of activities that help users. If they leave with nothing but time taken out of their day, this app will have failed in achieving its goal. But if it helps them feel a little more cared for, proud of themselves, and supported in building healthy habits, then Wholesome Haven will have done what it’s meant to do… be a safe, wholesome space where people can learn to take care of themselves.