About the game jam

In august the HKU organised an applied game jam with a korean univesrity. Students from china, japan, netherlands and different korean universities got the chance to participate. From the HKU five game and five music students were selected to go to korea to participate, I was lucky enough to be selected to go.

Multi-cultural team

When the game jam started it was chaos to try and form a balanced team. Based on the previous game jams the teachers adviced us to work with one other dutchman in the team. In the end we managed to form groups and I was in one with a a Dutch composer, a Korean game designer who spoke english fairly well, a Korean artist who spoke minimal english and a Korean programmer who also spoke minimal english. The Korean game designer often functioned as a translater when more detailed information needed to be communicated.

The most interesting thing of the game jam was working with people from such a different culture. I am really used to taking initiative but they viewed that as being aggresive and were taken aback. I had to adjust taking a more subtle approach in order to not alienate the Korean students.

About CREA Summer Academy

Past july I participated in a summer academy in Utrecht about creating a start-up. Young people from around the world came together for two weeks to create a product concept and business and marketing plan. During those two weeks we got all kind of relevent lectures and at the end we pitched our ideas to a board of dutch professionals.

I worked with a russian woman with a business psychology background who wanted to make budgeting fun. She had noticed how people wanted to do budgeting but always quit after a while, she therefore wanted to keep people engaged through fun.

Our process

We worked with the design thinking process where the need of the user is central in the design. With the help and feedback of the teachers and research into our target group we slowly discovered that people don't want to do budgeting, they want to have control over their finances. They think budgeting is the way to not overspend and see that red figure at the end of the month. So instead of making budgeting fun and easy to do our goal changed into helping people who have the financial means to make ends meet every month to stop overspending.

Willpower and our concept

There are two problems with people who overspend. The first is that buying something gives instant gratification because the result is immediate, while walking away has a delayed gratification since you only see the positive result at the end of the month.

The second is that it takes willpower to keep yourself from buying something and your willpower goes down when your tired, make desicions , are hungry, are stressed, etc. When this happens the blood goes to the fight/flight part of your brain shutting down your ability to reason clearly.

Our concept solves these problems by cultivating the willpower and bringing the blood back to your pre-frontal cortex allowing you to make measured desicions and rewarding the player if he doesn't buy something.