Daydream: A Healing Game for Mitigating Quarantine-induced Negative Emotions with Music Adventure

Many people all over the world still suffer from the stress induced by quarantine and social distancing during the coronavirus outbreak, and it is a topic of significance to manage negative feelings and emotions when considering mental health and wellness. Our questions are: "Can a game help people maintain mental health and wellness in such a situation?" and "Will virtual escape from isolation in the game help people feel better in reality?" Therefore, with the design concept of a "healing game", we developed Daydream, a game that combines puzzles and interactive music-making experiences with the design concept of a "healing game" to help players slow down, relax, and imagine. In Daydream, players collect magic objects that can retrieve the main character's memories and unfold her imagination, allowing players to enter a musical adventure. While this research project is still in the early stage, we conducted a preliminary user study and the feedback from the participant were generally positive to our design concept and game design. We believe such a design concept of a 'healing game' would be promising as an interesting research topic in serious games.