Gaming for Great Relationships!
Location
We are creating a suite of games which teach via fun and interactive games the skills for building strong relationships.
About You
Location
Project Street Address
Project City
Project Province/State
Project Postal/Zip Code
Project Country
Your idea
Year work began:
2005
Focus of activity
Technology
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Project URL (include HTTP://)
Plot your innovation within the mosaic of solutions
Which of these barriers is the primary focus of your work?
Insufficient Evidence that Games Improve Health
Which of the principles is the primary focus of your work?
Emotional Health
If you believe some other barrier or principle should be included in the mosaic, please describe it and how it would affect the positioning of your initiative in the mosaic:
This field has not been completed
Name Your Project
Gaming for Great Relationships!
Describe Your Idea
We are creating a suite of games which teach via fun and interactive games the skills for building strong relationships.
Innovation
What is your signature innovation in one sentence?
We are creating a suite of games which teach via fun and interactive games the skills for building strong relationships.
Describe your innovation. What makes your idea unique and different than others doing work in the field?
On the one hand, marriage is a highly personal decision. At the same time, research is building that healthy, stable marriages and healthy, long-term partnerships bring health and welfare benefits for couples and their children -- see http://www.healthymarriageinfo.org for more info. For instance, healthy marriages seems to be a particularly potent vehicle for reducing depression, lowering the odds of experiencing domestic violence, and increasing children's academic achievements.
However, no one in the marriage education community has delivered interventions in a new media world. Nobody has tried to create games for skills-based marriage education. Likewise, nobody has tried to establish a model which would allow online marriage education to be freely available at the scale the internet makes possible.
What barriers exist that are creating the problem your innovation is hoping to address/change?
While workshops are the norm in marriage/relationship ed., today people are more likely to turn to their mommy'sforum.com than to their community center for advice and information. However, most marriage education is delivered via 8 hour classroom-based courses. These models will be very difficult to scale. With demand surging (Texas now waives the marriage license fee for all couples who take a marriage ed course for example) a captivating and scalable model is needed.
Delivery Model: How do you implement your innovation and apply it to the challenge/problem you are addressing.
Funding from a federal Health and Human Services Healthy Marriages Demonstration Grant has allowed us to create an initial "library" of games targeting expectant couples for free usage by couples and by other web-sites who would like to embed them into their sites.
The following links lead to several sample episodes (in addition to those above. They take a bit to load, please be patient):
Interactive magazines - http://niven.askforcents.com/po2/grant/episode_one/trunk
http://niven.askforcents.com/po2/grant/episode_three/trunk
Arcade game with a twist-- http://niven.askforcents.com/po2/grant/episode_four/trunk
Scrapbook -- http://www.po2.com/The-Wedding-Flowers
How do you plan to scale your innovation?
We are launching a four prong distribution approach.
First, we are partnering with existing portals to integrate our materials into their sites. See http://babyfit.sparkpeople.com/healthy-relationships.asp for example.
Next we will market directly to end users.
Finally our games will also be available on inexpensive portable kiosk computers (around USD $500/device) for placement in doctors offices, churches, community centers, WIC offices etc.
We also plan to scale by adding breadth to the "library." Currently we are looking for creative funding sources to support the development of games targeting different niche audiences like stressed military marriages, low-income first time fathers-to-be, and Spanish speakers,teen relationships, engaged couples, married couples, struggling couples, minority couples, SpBGLT couples etc. These would be distributed via the same three mechanisms.
Impact
Provide one sentence describing your impact.
We hope to increase the number of people who are able to reap the health and other benefits of healthy, stable marriages/partnerships.
What impact has your innovation had to date? Exactly who are the beneficiaries of your innovation?
Our current round of games (like the 2nd example above) are targeted at expectant couples. This is a particularly vulnerable time for relationships--especially for the 35+% of unmarried couples expecting a baby.
We hope that our games will both benefit end-users by teaching skills for building healthier and stabler relationships and will benefit others in the marriage education community by providing a next-generation resource to supplement existing programs.
Our games are being released on our first pregnancy site partner site as I type. We are currently in discussion with three other potential partner sites. By offering exciting content for free we hope to shift the climate at existing sites to include more healthy relationship content.
In sum, are games ultimately benefit end-users and (hopefully) their children by delivering training on ways to make relationships more healthy, loving and satisfying. We also benefit web-content providers by giving free quality content.
How many people have you served directly?
We aim to have around 80K users within 6 months and 400K users of our current library of games targeting expectant couples over a 5 year period. The games have just been released this week.
As we expand to other areas we aim to repeat and increase these numbers for multiple different populations.
How many people have you served indirectly?
Our project will indirectly help the spouses and children of people who learn from our games. Likewise our product should also indirectly help other groups promoting marriage education by providing an appealing glimpse into the kind of material one would learn at a marriage education class.
Please list any other measures reflective of the impact of your innovation
Our impact will be assessed 1)by number of users and repeat users, 2) via qualitative interviews and 3) via tracking of usage patterns. We believe it is premature to attempt to assess impact until we have honed in on a product that is able to attract and hold users.
Down the road we will conduct more formal evaluations of how the games alter behaviors.
What are the main barriers to creating your impact?
The primary barrier for us is finding funding to create new games for a wide variety of target audiences. These games are a very inexpensive way to deliver quality and fun educational content per user-- but the up-front costs are significant to build each game.
At the same time, while we are using primarily guerrilla and viral tactics to inexpensively find users, we may discover that we need a more substantial marketing budget to place games in high-visibility areas.
This Entry is about (Issues)
Sustainability
How is your initiative financed?
Our current round of games are financed via a federal grant from the Department of Health and Human Services. See above.
Provide information on your finances and organization: annual budget, annual revenue, number of staff:
There are two closely related companies working on this project. Power of Two owns the marriage education content and the proprietary software used to make the games. TherapyHelp administers our grant. Both are small companies with under 10 employees and annual budgets of around 500K.
What is the potential demand for your innovation?
There are lots and lots and lots of couples in this world. Ideally, all couples would have exposure and access to high quality, engaging, skills based marriage/relationship-education. In addition, groups working with high school and college aged youth have shown that even at this age there is an important role relationship education plays in reducing dating violence and early pregnancies.
What are the main barriers to financial sustainability?
While grant funding is a wonderful jump-start, we are exploring business models to partner with corporations to make this type of games available for free as part of their web development/advertising budgets.
The Story
What is the origin of this innovation? Tell us your story.
We're a small family run company. Power of Two was started by Dr. Susan Heitler a clinical psychologist in Denver, CO who specializes in working with couples. Author of From Conflict to Resolution, Dr. Heitler's pioneering work integrated the win-win paradigm into the world of personal relationships. Her book The Power of Two, teaches couples the full set of skills necessary to create a marriage based on win-win collaboration.
Daughter, Dr. Abigail Hirsch and son Jesse Hirsch have joined the team to bring the Power of Two materials into the digital world.
See www.po2.com for more details about this mother, son, daughter and a few good friends team.
Please provide a personal bio. Note this may be used in Changemakers marketing material
Dr. Susan Heitler -- BA Harvard College, Ph.D. NYU-- Clinical Psychology Dr. Heitler's books have been translated into many languages and she lectures world-wide on conflict resolution based and couples therapy.
Dr. Abigail Hirsch --BA Harvard College, MA -- U of Colo. Educational Psychology-- Ph.D. U Mass Boston-- Clinical Psychology
Jesse Heitler -- BA Yale University, computer science.
How did you hear about this contest and what is your main incentive to participate? (this is confidential)
We love Ashoka and often follow what you're doing!
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Comments
Thanks for your submission. Dr. Hirsch. I write as it prompts some questions.
I wonder why -- among all the possible places you might have started your game/"intervention" -- you started where you did (at helping players discern the difference between - and improve their skills in - "digestive" versus "rejective" communication)? Did you start there because psychologists have determined those communications questions/ problems to be significantly more predictive of -- or productive of -- fatal problems in a relationship? and if so: how much more predictive (or productive) are they than other meaningful marker that I leave you to choose? (I think that, in Blink, Malcolm Gladwell suggested that such speech habits had been proven to be either predictive or productive of such deep problems, but it's eons since I read it...) I ask because it would help us improve our understanding of how much change your game promises to effectuate.
I attempted to run "the wedding flowers" (a second game) from your website and couldn't download it. I wonder: on what does it concentrate? a different set of skills?
Third: i understand your hestitating in describing how you'll quantitatively evaluate your game's effects on behavior. At the same time, I wonder: are there any concrete goals or markers you're (quietly) hoping to achieve -- or that we (onlookers) can hope to expect -- given precedents in the field of (non-game-based) marriage counseling? All your references to outcomes (from pre-existing marriage counseling efforts/projects) are vague and non-quantitative -- making it difficult for readers to have a reasonable notion of the scale or type of change your game could prompt in the best (or worst) of circumstances.
I look forward to hearing your responses.
Best,
Diane
Changemakers
Excellent questions!
In terms of where we started, this game is one of 8 being released this year (see http://babyfit.sparkpeople.com/healthy-relationships.asp for two others, another can be viewed on our test server at http://niven.askforcents.com/po2/grant/episode_three/trunk/platform.html), so I think it makes more sense to think of these as a suite or library rather than one stand-alone game. Over the course of the next four years the suite will grow to include approximately 30 episodes covering a wide spectrum of topics/skills demonstrated to be important for increasing marital and relationship health. The suite will all be focused for expectant parents, but will also have considerable breadth in terms of specific demographic being targeted.
In our planning we have tried to build the suite starting with some episodes that give a broad overview of the types of skills that create more stable/healthy/happy partnerships (see http://niven.askforcents.com/po2/grant/episode_three/trunk/platform.html for a game in this genre) in conjunction with games, like the one above, which hone in on specific skills which are particularly critical. We believe that both the broad strokes theory and the nitty-gritty how does it sound/how do I do it must go hand-in-hand for maximum effectiveness. We are also exploring a variety of game formats to determine what formats/features hold users most effectively. Given that they will all be used voluntarily, high entertainment value is critical to open the door to being able to pass on an educational experience.
Your recall of Gladwell's book is accurate. As John Gottman (the researcher Gladwell quotes) and many other researchers have demonstrated there are a number of highly leveraged verbal and emotional interaction patterns. At the core of this set of skills is how couples talk to and listen to each other, how they handle conflict and how much fun they have together. Learn to do these skillfully, the odds zoom up that your marriage will blossom.
In terms of concrete goals, I'm happy to be less quite about our goals. We hope to demonstrate that this vehicle for delivering marriage education (short chunks, user-initiated, web-delivered, and game-based in style (as opposed to 8-hour classroom experience or streamed video with e-mail follow-up)) will prove to be at least as effective, and possible more, than traditional marriage education courses. In volume, it certainly is far far less costly.
So, then the question of quantitative goals becomes more generally 1) does marriage matter and 2) how effective is marriage education?
The best responses to question #1, which is a strong YES, marriage does seem to matter are the pamphlet here http://www.americanvalues.org/html/r-wmm.html, Gallagher and Waites The Case for Marriage and Kay S. Hymowitz's Marriage and Caste in America. The research accumulated in the past decade from across the political spectrum is clear that marriage does seem to create very significant advantages. Hymowitz argues that class divisions in American are better described as married versus unmarried America than any other standard. She demonstrates how a marriage-oriented "life-script" creates wealth and health. Those on a different, or scriptless path do far less well.
In terms of question #2, the data is also quite clear that for many, many couples, skills-based marriage education is very effective at increasing marital quality and reducing divorce. The article at http://www.heritage.org/research/welfare/bg1606.cfm is a strong (politically neutral it isn't, but the data is good) summary.
To give a more specific number, one program for new expectant parents had no new parents who had taken the program separate or divorce at 18 mo. out compared to a 12.5% separate/divorce rate in the control group. There were 1.6M first births in the US in 2005, a 10% reduction in separations/divorces would be 160K more children in two-parent families.
Another interesting statistic-- Over one-half of births to women aged 20-24 years and nearly 3 in 10 births to women aged 25-29 years were to unmarried women. If educational materials like ours helped even a small percentage of these women form stable families, the impact could be very very significant.
These stats can be found at http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/pubs/pubd/hestats/prelimbirths05/prelim....
Hope this helps put things in more context.
We really appreciate your time and thoughtfulness!
Abigail Hirsch, Ph.D.
Executive Director
Power of Two
Thanks for your responses. They prompt some thoughts.
I wonder: might it not be wise for you to define more clearly, in one place in the body of your entry application, the scope of your entry (the number of games, their titles, the websites where they can be found etc) to ensure that judges consider the whole body of work you'd like to be considered?
In addition, I wonder whether you might not want to find ways of incorporating into your entry application the answers you provided above, since I think they help define more clearly for readers and judges the nature and degree of your games' innovativeness.
A potential complication of developing work on the family and marriage in a period in which both subjects are at the center of intense political contest is that one's work might be vulnerable to, or reinforcing of, political ideologies. Have you taken any measures to minimize such vulnerability? and if so, might you describe those measures? .
I look forward to hearing your responses.
Best,
Diane
Changemakers
Hi Diane--
I've tweaked our proposal thanks to your insightful comments. Bit tricky with the space limits!
I'm trying to figure out where to speak to your question about the political climate and would love your ideas on this.
Thanks,
Abigail
Abigail Hirsch, Ph.D.
Executive Director
Power of Two
You are perfectly right about this, all of us need a little bit more marriage education, we are dealing with feelings and we know feelings are hard to control. Perhaps this way the right people would listen and learn about their marriage problems and this way accept help more easily. I think many broken marriages still stand a chance if they decide to ask advises from a marriage counselor, and this very much depends on their will and education.
Hi there. I really hope you see the article in today's times that points to recent studies indicating the powerful effects marital communication styles have on the cardiovascular health of (particularly the women in) a couple. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/02/health/02well.html?_r=1&8dpc&oref=slogin
This suggests that your tools can improve not only psychological and economic condition of families but their physical health too! Such research/revelations promise to open great new avenues for you, no?
Best,
Diane
Changemakers
Comments
Thanks for your submission. Dr. Hirsch. I write as it prompts some questions.
I wonder why -- among all the possible places you might have started your game/"intervention" -- you started where you did (at helping players discern the difference between - and improve their skills in - "digestive" versus "rejective" communication)? Did you start there because psychologists have determined those communications questions/ problems to be significantly more predictive of -- or productive of -- fatal problems in a relationship? and if so: how much more predictive (or productive) are they than other meaningful marker that I leave you to choose? (I think that, in Blink, Malcolm Gladwell suggested that such speech habits had been proven to be either predictive or productive of such deep problems, but it's eons since I read it...) I ask because it would help us improve our understanding of how much change your game promises to effectuate.
I attempted to run "the wedding flowers" (a second game) from your website and couldn't download it. I wonder: on what does it concentrate? a different set of skills?
Third: i understand your hestitating in describing how you'll quantitatively evaluate your game's effects on behavior. At the same time, I wonder: are there any concrete goals or markers you're (quietly) hoping to achieve -- or that we (onlookers) can hope to expect -- given precedents in the field of (non-game-based) marriage counseling? All your references to outcomes (from pre-existing marriage counseling efforts/projects) are vague and non-quantitative -- making it difficult for readers to have a reasonable notion of the scale or type of change your game could prompt in the best (or worst) of circumstances.
I look forward to hearing your responses.
Best,
Diane
Changemakers
Excellent questions!
In terms of where we started, this game is one of 8 being released this year (see http://babyfit.sparkpeople.com/healthy-relationships.asp for two others, another can be viewed on our test server at http://niven.askforcents.com/po2/grant/episode_three/trunk/platform.html), so I think it makes more sense to think of these as a suite or library rather than one stand-alone game. Over the course of the next four years the suite will grow to include approximately 30 episodes covering a wide spectrum of topics/skills demonstrated to be important for increasing marital and relationship health. The suite will all be focused for expectant parents, but will also have considerable breadth in terms of specific demographic being targeted.
In our planning we have tried to build the suite starting with some episodes that give a broad overview of the types of skills that create more stable/healthy/happy partnerships (see http://niven.askforcents.com/po2/grant/episode_three/trunk/platform.html for a game in this genre) in conjunction with games, like the one above, which hone in on specific skills which are particularly critical. We believe that both the broad strokes theory and the nitty-gritty how does it sound/how do I do it must go hand-in-hand for maximum effectiveness. We are also exploring a variety of game formats to determine what formats/features hold users most effectively. Given that they will all be used voluntarily, high entertainment value is critical to open the door to being able to pass on an educational experience.
Your recall of Gladwell's book is accurate. As John Gottman (the researcher Gladwell quotes) and many other researchers have demonstrated there are a number of highly leveraged verbal and emotional interaction patterns. At the core of this set of skills is how couples talk to and listen to each other, how they handle conflict and how much fun they have together. Learn to do these skillfully, the odds zoom up that your marriage will blossom.
In terms of concrete goals, I'm happy to be less quite about our goals. We hope to demonstrate that this vehicle for delivering marriage education (short chunks, user-initiated, web-delivered, and game-based in style (as opposed to 8-hour classroom experience or streamed video with e-mail follow-up)) will prove to be at least as effective, and possible more, than traditional marriage education courses. In volume, it certainly is far far less costly.
So, then the question of quantitative goals becomes more generally 1) does marriage matter and 2) how effective is marriage education?
The best responses to question #1, which is a strong YES, marriage does seem to matter are the pamphlet here http://www.americanvalues.org/html/r-wmm.html, Gallagher and Waites The Case for Marriage and Kay S. Hymowitz's Marriage and Caste in America. The research accumulated in the past decade from across the political spectrum is clear that marriage does seem to create very significant advantages. Hymowitz argues that class divisions in American are better described as married versus unmarried America than any other standard. She demonstrates how a marriage-oriented "life-script" creates wealth and health. Those on a different, or scriptless path do far less well.
In terms of question #2, the data is also quite clear that for many, many couples, skills-based marriage education is very effective at increasing marital quality and reducing divorce. The article at http://www.heritage.org/research/welfare/bg1606.cfm is a strong (politically neutral it isn't, but the data is good) summary.
To give a more specific number, one program for new expectant parents had no new parents who had taken the program separate or divorce at 18 mo. out compared to a 12.5% separate/divorce rate in the control group. There were 1.6M first births in the US in 2005, a 10% reduction in separations/divorces would be 160K more children in two-parent families.
Another interesting statistic-- Over one-half of births to women aged 20-24 years and nearly 3 in 10 births to women aged 25-29 years were to unmarried women. If educational materials like ours helped even a small percentage of these women form stable families, the impact could be very very significant.
These stats can be found at http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/pubs/pubd/hestats/prelimbirths05/prelim....
Hope this helps put things in more context.
We really appreciate your time and thoughtfulness!
Abigail Hirsch, Ph.D.
Executive Director
Power of Two
Thanks for your responses. They prompt some thoughts.
I wonder: might it not be wise for you to define more clearly, in one place in the body of your entry application, the scope of your entry (the number of games, their titles, the websites where they can be found etc) to ensure that judges consider the whole body of work you'd like to be considered?
In addition, I wonder whether you might not want to find ways of incorporating into your entry application the answers you provided above, since I think they help define more clearly for readers and judges the nature and degree of your games' innovativeness.
A potential complication of developing work on the family and marriage in a period in which both subjects are at the center of intense political contest is that one's work might be vulnerable to, or reinforcing of, political ideologies. Have you taken any measures to minimize such vulnerability? and if so, might you describe those measures? .
I look forward to hearing your responses.
Best,
Diane
Changemakers
Hi Diane--
I've tweaked our proposal thanks to your insightful comments. Bit tricky with the space limits!
I'm trying to figure out where to speak to your question about the political climate and would love your ideas on this.
Thanks,
Abigail
Abigail Hirsch, Ph.D.
Executive Director
Power of Two
You are perfectly right about this, all of us need a little bit more marriage education, we are dealing with feelings and we know feelings are hard to control. Perhaps this way the right people would listen and learn about their marriage problems and this way accept help more easily. I think many broken marriages still stand a chance if they decide to ask advises from a marriage counselor, and this very much depends on their will and education.
Hi there. I really hope you see the article in today's times that points to recent studies indicating the powerful effects marital communication styles have on the cardiovascular health of (particularly the women in) a couple. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/02/health/02well.html?_r=1&8dpc&oref=slogin
This suggests that your tools can improve not only psychological and economic condition of families but their physical health too! Such research/revelations promise to open great new avenues for you, no?
Best,
Diane
Changemakers