Sleepy Games

Sleepy Games are transformational games that aim to improve sleep quality for players. Sleepy Games do so by targeting context and time-specific barriers that arise for players throughout their day.

Our core design values include:

• Identifying the problem space through play and ritualized mechanics
• Context-dependent, human-centered intervention-making
• Improve the stigma of treatment, embedded design
  • More avenues to explore to improve sleep quality that isn’t just focused on an illness, cure.
• Multi-sensory product design

Over the course of fourteen months, we reviewed the literature, interviewed stakeholders, created prototypes, and conducted field tests.

Through an iterative game design process and extensive analysis of our design artifacts and documentation, we identified seven cross-cutting challenges of designing games for sleep, and articulated the sleepy games approach to addressing each one.

For an overview of the project, see our report, which includes brief descriptions of our fifteen game prototypes.

To learn more about our theory and field tests, see our papers below.

Publications

Pusateri, J., Leng, J., Wang, Q., Chen, X., & Hammer, J. (in press). Designing games for healthy sleep. CHI 2020. [pdf]

Pusateri, J., Leng, J., Timczyk, J., Chen, X., Wang, Q., Shah, K. S., Jasani, T. K., & Hammer, J. (2019). Toward a design theory of sleepy games. Extended Abstracts of the 2019 CHI Conference on Computer-Human Interaction in Play. [pdf]

Collaborators

Funding

Many thanks to Philips Health for their generous support for our project.