Augmenting Abilities through Play: A Convo with Eloka Agu

Designing for Dementia with Nostalgic Gaming & Why Creativity Needs Constraints

Welcome to MINDS AT PLAY, we explore the curious intersection of blockchain tech, the anthropology of play, and digital sanctuaries for self-expression, self-care and fun. We delve into game-based learning frameworks, and discover why game design (especially web3 game design) is the essential skill for optimal cognition & flourishing in the 21st century.

My name is Cynthia Gentry, I have pioneered gamification primitives for web3 ecosystems, and have been teaching about and working in the nascent and, at times, chaotic crypto industry for the last 4 years.

To kickstart MINDS AT PLAY, I am interviewing my very brilliant and amazingly handsome boyfriend, Eloka Agu. Eloka is a designer, entrepreneur and investor. He is also currently getting a double masters degree in Engineering & Design at the esteemed Royal College of Art. Eloka and I discuss his design process, the potentials of game-based learning, the wonderful gift of constraint for creatives and how Tamagotchi inspired him to reimagine healthcare hardware. All this and more!

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Cynthia: I know you don’t go to school in a very traditional way. The Royal College of Art is to you a playground and studio that allows you to explore new ideas with minimal constraints. So what kinds of things have you been playing around with?

Eloka: The first interesting thing that I played around with was a VR game that was designed to incentivize ocean clean-up. I designed the game using Unreal engine – from scratch, built all the blueprints, created the Earth, the skies, the seas. It was god-mode basically, it was fun! Then created a flying vessel that was flying in the sky, and that could also navigate into the water and into the waves and underwater to explore marine life. So in this game I designed one vehicle that could both fly like a plane and also explore the depths like a submarine. But of course, you can't actually do that in real life. I don't know any vehicles that can do that. But in a game, you can.

Cynthia: I will just say, that was the first time I think you designed a game, right? And it was incredible. It was a really, really awesome game. And I liked that you had elements of realism, like the water and the natural environment, but you also created a vehicle that allows people to, you know, go up in the sky and fly around but also go underwater. So it's a little bit of magical realism, which I think all the best games have a little bit of realism and also a little bit of whimsy, so I think you're a natural game designer.

Eloka: Thank you very much. I appreciate that. This game was the first time in the program I felt I was exercising my brain in a way I otherwise wouldn’t have done. It became a learning tool and I learned a lot more about science and physics and like the way that the moon controls how the planets move and how gravity impacts waves, and the speed of waves – like it just made me look at things with a level of detail I hadn’t before. In my first company, my role was in product, I was the CEO so I was the “big picture thinker,” and dealt with the broad vision, the strategy, recruitment, and the direction of the company. This was the first time I had to like literally create a world and think about the small details in making it. Should the water move at this pace or this pace? Should the vessel be able to accelerate? Or should it not? If it accelerates, will that make the person flying the vessel dizzy?

You're making all these different calculations when you're designing a game and that makes you think of every angle and every potential use case. Which makes you very detailed. You know, it's very difficult to replicate that. I think it's very difficult to replicate that with the level of ease that you can and as visually as you can with a game. Actually, as I was thinking, I just got the phrase: second-order learning. I learned more than what I “needed to.” Game-based learning can foster second-order learning and creativity by allowing for exploration beyond the constraints of the curriculum or module.

Pearl, the VR game that was designed to incentivize ocean-clean up. Players had the opportunity to dive underwater and collect rare pearls which could be exchanged for NFTs.

Cynthia: Let’s jump forward to your recent module, the one that was, in your words “challenging and controversial” lol. Walk us through your process on how you deconstruct a problem, and how you go about problem solving.

Eloka: Okay, so we had complete freedom with the module in terms of what the project was. The brief was to make something. That was it. We had three months…

Cynthia: Wow! I didn’t even know that. Do you think that made it a bit more challenging, that there was no prompt?

Eloka: Yea, that’s what made it so hard. Like they literally said, “you have a team – here's your team”. So we had a team of four people. “You have three months to make something”. And that’s it. So having absolutely no guidance as to what to even solve was the first key challenge. To define the problem we wanted to solve we discussed what we wanted as the output from the module, because we had enough freedom to tailor it how we wanted. Two of my colleagues wanted to do something that had a healthcare related output. My desired output was that I wanted to make hardware, because that was my primary motivation for enrolling in the school in the first place and I hadn't done a hardware project yet.

Cynthia: What you said was great. Because there was really no guidance. There were no constraints, you guys gave yourself constraints by defining your motivations. So half of your team was highly motivated by healthcare. You were motivated to do something that was hardware focused. And those motivations gave you enough constraints to start actually creating. So would you say that for game design based learning and education, it’s important to have at least some constraints?

Eloka: Every artist will tell you this, in my opinion, every real artist can tell you this: constraint is the cornerstone of creativity. There's no creativity without constraint. Impossible, can’t happen. Why was Twitter so successful? Before Twitter, you had writing and publishing platforms, you had blogspot, you had blogger and Myspace, Facebook, you had a range of solutions out there in the marketplace. So if you wanted to share a status update as to what was going on, you could. What made Twitter successful? It introduced a very strict character limit. It was like 180 characters. It's like a sentence or two sentences. You had to condense your idea into like maximum, two sentences. That constraint was the foundation of the platform and that’s what made it great. I think that applies to every great product. I think it applies to every great process. Constraint is the core prerequisite for creativity. If a constraint doesn't exist externally, one must create a constraint internally.

Cynthia: And you did that by defining key motivations. Wonderful, keep going.

Eloka: Once we knew the motivations, we followed a design framework called “The Double Diamond.” First of all, you go outwards. You generate a lot of ideas very quickly. And then you go inwards, and get rid of all the rubbish ideas, so that's one diamond. And then you're left with a new set of ideas or a slightly more refined set of ideas than the initial set of ideas. And then you repeat the process. So you generate a ton of ideas. You go out as broad as you can, as wide as you can, as far as you can. And then again, you taper them back in and get rid of the rubbish. And so it's called a double diamond. We did that.

Double Diamond Visual Example

We each explored ideas based on our motivations and came together to see if there was a common through line between our ideas. We put all the ideas onto post-it notes. And then we organized those post it notes into groups of similar post-it notes. The conclusion was just like the thing that unites all of our different ideas, is that we want to use technology to augment human abilities.

I started looking into AR, AI, VR, like all these technologies that can simulate different sensors and give people additional powers. So even though [my team and I] had completely different subject areas we were exploring, we could agree on the fact that we wanted to use whatever we're doing to augment some sort of human capability.

Cynthia: I love this theme because it's niche enough where you have your constraints, but you still have a lot of freedom and room for exploration. Alright, so you have your theme and you guys kind of know what you're doing now, how do you begin the exploration process? 

Eloka: If our theme is to use technology to augment human abilities. The question then becomes which abilities right? I used a reference-driven approach to explore abilities, starting with super-heroes in fiction. And then from there, we decided that of all the human abilities that were most important to improve was cognition, because cognition impacts all of the other ones. Once we narrowed our theme down to using technology to augment human cognition, then the idea to address dementia became quite clear. From a healthcare perspective, we really liked the idea of restorative health. We began examining existing technology and how we can tailor it to dementia. So we were thinking of creating like VR headsets and AI stuff for people with dementia but realized that we weren’t actually thinking of the user. So we spoke to a representative of people with dementia. She said that people with dementia love nostalgic products that live in their long term memory. So any gadget would have to be retro, really intuitive and easy to use. So like an iPhone, for instance, wouldn’t be good enough for them — it’s too confusing. Too many apps, too much going on.

So we wanted something that was universal and didn't need much training. Like you never needed much training to interact with toys, and games. There was no rule manual to toys, no learning-curve, but people also love them. So my mind went to interactive toys and games, game consoles that felt like toys. So I brought a Tamagotchi and a Gameboy into the studio as references for hardware that is tactile, lo-fi and ultimately useful for people who are cognitively impaired. I let my team play around with the toys, and they loved it so much. It was verification for me. I remembered my sister loved the Tamagotchi, and my teammates loved Tamagotchi when they were young. And me playing with the gameboy, took me to a place where I was a bit more vulnerable and our group bonded over our shared experience.

Nostalgia Ultra, Eloka’s version.

Cynthia: There is a sense of vulnerability, there's a childlikeness to games and even the hardware that games are associated to, and some people may find it to be a bit unserious. And I know you received a bit of push-back here, it’s like “you're going to a prestigious university to make a little Tamagotchi game”. And it's so interesting though, the response that you got from your team where they resonated with it, it connected to their childhood, it brought warmth and play, it brought an element of play into discovery. Even the way it resonated with people outside of your school. People were reaching out to you telling you, “you know, my grandfather had dementia, he would have loved this or he would have wanted something like this.” I think that's because you went back to your past and you took an element that just was wholesome, and you brought that into hardware, and I feel like sometimes hardware is just so cold and sterile and there's something so delightful about a little Tamagotchi or a Gameboy and it's so approachable.

I just think it's brilliant that you you took that game design concept and you brought it into healthcare. And into spaces where it's warmly welcomed, and I think really needed — so just hats off to you. We can talk about this for hours and hours and hours and I think you may still need to dissect a little bit more since this project was so recent, but I'm super proud of you.

Torch, an intelligent companion that prevents people with early-stage dementia from public wandering and helps them to always find their way home. Designed by Eloka and his team for the Royal College of Art.

Alright,

Thats all for our first post folks. I hope this was as illuminating, and insightful for you as it was for me. Many thanks to my love Eloka. Today I learned that whoever can design an intuitive and nostalgic dementia care product can win the 21st century. The dementia care products market is expected to be worth around $43.6 billion by 2032 and as Eloka illustrated, game design thinking is the key to hacking into this profitable and life-saving industry. I also learned that oftentimes the playful way, is the best way. What did you learn? Let me know in the comments ౨ৎ ⊹ ‧₊˚

- Cynthia Bahati Gentry

“Constraint is the cornerstone of creativity” - Eloka Agu