ELISE MACKELPRANG

Storytelling has been the foundation of my life. It’s given me guidance, and hope, it’s built role models, personalities, and reflections of reality that provide insight into endless potential. Originally I intended to simply improve the concept of storytelling as a medium, create a platform for crowd-source creative writing where stories build off of each other or spiral into different directions. It all sounded like a pretty neat idea in my head, and building it on paper didn’t seem too difficult either. 

 

A lot of that was tossed out of the window when I took Entrepreneurship and the Scientific Method (AKA ENTP 1020). This class was… rigorous, and it did a great job of undermining nearly everything I had originally planned for my grand innovation by asking me a simple question: What problem are you solving with your innovation? I thought I was solving the secret equation of absent creativity in storytelling, or creating some brand new product that didn’t solve a problem but opened a new world of possibilities. But soon the harder questions were asked in the class: What needs are you meeting, what sort of value does your idea provide to a market or a society? Who has a stake in this idea and how will it affect their lives? How will you make money off of this product? What secret sauce could you implement that will prevent competitors from mimicking your idea? These were brutal questions that forced me to really think about what sort of problem I really wanted to solve. 

 

I get sent back to the drawing board, in Seoul South Korea with no specific idea regarding where to go and the same question haunting me: what sort of problem am I solving for others? Storytelling is something I still cared very deeply about, and I wanted it to be part of my life. But did I really want to improve storytelling? Or did I want to use storytelling to solve problems? I started to look into the societal problems that South Korea currently faces. It has one of the fasting growing economies in the world. High performance and fast globalization. A country that was identified as a third world country had leapt to a first world country within less than a century. 

 

Despite all the glorious accomplishments of the country, I soon recognized that such fast success comes with equal burden and hardship. South Korea currently experiences the second highest rate of suicide in the world, with higher rates of suicide existing amongst their youth who are burdened with high expectations and the endless rankings promoted by their education system. Seeking mental health aid is a social taboo in South Korea, and employers are much less likely to hire individuals if their health records show any hints of mental illness. Without the access to appropriate care, many individuals, ranging from teens to elderly, all suffer in silence and without proper care. Social activism doesn’t guarantee improvement when the country is enmeshed in a strong eastern philosophy that doesn’t emphasize the well being of individuals, but more so of the collective. So I discovered a problem that was meaningful to me, but I wasn’t positive on how to solve the problem.

 

Luckily, my solution wasn’t too far away. Throughout the semester in South Korea I had the privilege of serving as an intern for Happify, a mental health application that use positive psychology and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to improve user moods. During the course of my research into Happify and its competitors, I was provided the technical tools that could be used to solve my problem. If a South Korean student had no desire to visit a psychologist, or receive mental healthcare, then I could bring mental healthcare to them. Running through endless applications and business models provided me with a solid insight of what techniques and practices were working with users, and what was less effective. Encouraging mentality of gratitude often improved user mood, along with exercise and other simple yet effective techniques to increase user energy and alter their attitude. Yet after a certain period of time many users usually decrease their activity of the app. This may have been because the user reaches their goals and finds no need to rely on the app, or (and arguably more likely) they lost the desire to continue engaging with the application.

 

Retention for Happify, Pacifica, Duo-lingo, and other self-learning/help apps is the biggest struggle. To overcome this issue, I decided to embrace stronger engagement, and this is where storytelling really came into play. Film, literature, and videogames are all various formats to storytelling, and an engaged recipient of the story is more likely to return to the experience so they can receive the full story, and therefore the full extent of treatment for mental health. 

 

Therefore, I decided to combine it all: Mental Health, Videogames, and Korea. But telling a story to the correct audience needed something more. What kind of story should I tell to my audience that would captivate them? To make mental health management techniques appealing, I needed to determine what would really matter to my market. Add in another few dozen hours of research and a bit of digging around, asking questions of Korean students, Korean family members, and even just wandering the city to get some inspiration. The result: Hilltop. 

 

The mountainous regions of Seoul left me to a lot of reflecting as I was huffing and puffing up steep inclines to and from class, and it often brought to my mind how the mountainsides have been climbed for centuries. Mentally and physically, students at Chung-Dae university traverse the steep inclines throughout their college career, and centuries before them their ancestors and the families before them would climb up and down the mountains, each one trying to overcome their own individual challenges. Historically the scholars of South Korea would prepare to take the imperial exam, Gwageo, which would determine whether their future as an imperial leader or their life as a commoner. South Korea still remains deeply tied to this concept with the existence of Suneung, the college entrance exams. The scores of Suneung is powerful enough to determine a student’s future job opportunities, their future marriage, and their future college options. Despite the drastic change in their lifestyle, much of the struggles faced by their ancestors are not so different from their descendants. The story I decided to tell was a historic one, a call back to the traditions of South Korea during the Joseon dynasty when life was difficult and hectic for a promising youth just like today. 

 

By building on the similarities of history and applying it to the modern lifestyle, my goal was to implement the same techniques applied by companies such as Pacifica and Happify in an engaging and emotional manner. Not only would users be able to apply techniques to improve their mood, but the stories shared from Hilltop will be enough to inspire a user to implement the values of the game, and embrace a mentality that supports positive thinking, service, and other practices to promote a happier lifestyle. 

 

I had the idea, and I knew what I wanted to do. But now the third problem arose, and it’s one I’m still working on today: How do I keep a user engaged? While it is important to have a good story, and it’s important to implement the psychology techniques I intended, it was also pivotal to provide an engagement that made the user feel a flow between the emotional application and the practical application. So I decided to take two classes that would specifically help: Videogames and Storytelling, and Films, Literature, and Videogames. 

 

In videogames and storytelling, I learned how the mechanics of a game can be used as a narrative. Basic functions and actions taken by the player can be used to evoke emotions from the player, and when done well they can assist the player in understanding a creator’s aesthetic intent. Everything that you put into the design of a game can alter the player’s experience. Some games use complex rules and constraints and add a large number of features onto the player’s screen to assist in completing these complex rules. Other games reduce the features to simplicity, and do everything they can to immerse a player into an experience. Additionally there are also various means of developing a character or the environment, whether you want strictly structured characters that are pre-determined, or whether you want the player to be free to determine their avatar’s personality, and so on. 

 

This class opened a whole new world of options for me. A thousand and one ways to share Hilltop with the player, and even more still on how to find the optimal version of the game that would be capable of conveying my intent. Piece by piece I started to build an idea of how the games mechanics would perform for the player. Emphasis needed to be made on players making use of the learning modules for mental health, but it needed to be melded with the gameplay in such a way that players wouldn’t feel a dissonance between story and service. Part of me especially struggled with the idea that perhaps it would be too difficult to cross the cultural barrier. Eastern and Western philosophies are so drastically different from one another in their form and function that I worried my own bias would make Hilltop irrelevant to my selected market. 

 

Thankfully I was able to gain some guidance regarding this concern in the second class: Film, Literature, and Videogames. In this upper level class followin Videogames and Storytelling, I was given sound insight that really helped me find answers to my concerns. This class delved deeper into various storytelling mediums and analyzed how each method makes use of specific techniques to invoke their audience/player/reader’s emotions, what sort of dynamic relationships can be accomplished between the creator and the consumer, and how their chosen techniques inevitably affect the recipient of the story.  

 

Certain works are strictly structured with many constraints and controlled factors to produce a linear structure. Often times we have works that focus on an individual, ideals of good and evil, and other strongly western philosophies that support an immovable law that an individual must bend to in order to succeed. The laws of nature are exemplary in this case since they don’t care about any one person’s role in society, or whether they are good or evil. It’s a strict law where you will die if you do not find heat, food, water, and shelter. Certain requirements must be met in order to continue to the next level. My innovation project was reliant on this linear approach since my characters would be moving from a start to end. Players needed to start small and build and progress to slowly ‘climb the mountains’ of Hilltop.

 

But often the nature of an individual isn’t promoted in Eastern cultures. Less emphasis is given on any one individual’s story and more focus provided on a collective, or how to remove the individual’s desires for the sake of providing the best for society. It’s a drastically different mentality, and it’s often used in a rather non-linear sense. Regardless of the path a man chooses, he is ultimately insignificant in the grander scheme of things. So there was this constant struggled of philosophies, which arguably is what has caused the mental health issue in South Korea, Japan, and other East Asian countries. 

 

Ultimately, I needed to find the connecting point. How can I make a Western construct such as mental health a concept of value to an Eastern Philosophy? This class showed this to me through several works of literature as well as games, and that was the Aesthetic of Relinquishment. The ultimate unifying point was sacrifice. Individuals self sacrifice in order to achieve the greater good is not so different from an individual sacrificing their ego in order to focus on their community. This class helped me realize that Hilltop needed to emphasize the beauty of relinquishing specific burdens in order to achieve new heights. Positive Psychology requires a relinquishment of selfish mentality, and focus instead on external influences that make your life better. Hilltop requires the player’s character to relinquish his pride in order to connect with other characters, and to sacrifice time and effort to find new success, much like all of us do. This class was really the last piece to my puzzle, and it helped me determine exactly what I wanted Hilltop to accomplish. 

 

It was a pretty crazy journey for me, and I strongly believe that without these experiences I wouldn’t have been able to discover my innovation. Hilltop has become a project that I am intimately invested in. I still have a long way to go, and so much to do to make this real, but I care deeply about it. I care deeply about stories use as a tool to help people. I care deeply about how I can integrate stories into other fields, and I want to see what I can do with those ideas.