I really felt motivated to do the things that were helpful to me!
- M Meegan
The Guardians
A fun and ENTIRELY FREE mobile game that rewards you for doing real-life activities that improve your mental health!
A fun and ENTIRELY FREE mobile game that rewards you for doing real-life activities that improve your mental health!
The Guardians: Paradise Island is a unique game that rewards you for helping out your own mental health! Paradise Island provides the motivation that we all sometimes need to get up and help ourselves live better lives.
Every day, Paradise Island will prompt you to partake in a therapy known as Behavioral Activation. The Guardians: Paradise Island uses an abridged version of the therapy Behavioral Activation, which is a key part of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)! The therapy asks you find tasks that are meaningful to you, go do them, then reflect on how they made you feel.
We know that doing the right thing can be hard sometimes. But it's a lot easier with an immediate and fun reward! That's why we give you tons of in-game rewards just for helping yourself feel better!
Pretty sweet, right?
I really felt motivated to do the things that were helpful to me!
- M Meegan
It's easily the most fun mental health app I've ever seen!
- C Wilkes
I do love that it’s based on actual science and research!
- J Beyer
Go on daily adventures to collect more pets and rewards!
Use your resources wisely to increase your pets' skills!
Help your pets save Paradise Island using enchanted luaus!
Collect mystical fruit in the exciting new mini game!
The Guardians: Paradise Island uses an abridged version of the therapy Behavioral Activation, which is a key part of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)! The therapy basically asks you to do something meaningful, then reflect on how it made you feel.
That’s it!
When you’re depressed, you’re less likely to do the things that matter to you. This makes you more depressed, which makes you less likely to do things… It’s an endless cycle!
When you’re stuck in that cycle you need a kick to do the meaningful things in your life. And that’s where The Guardians comes in! We give you that extra motivation you sometimes need to get up and live your life!
This paper looked at the anonymized data gathered from Guardians: Unite the Realms and determined that machine learning algorithms can be used to analyze users’ ratings of their daily adventures and accurately suggest new adventures they will like and find helpful! We really look forward to adding this into our games to help people help themselves.
Based on Guardians: Unite the Realms, this paper shows that Guardians improves long-term engagement with mental health therapies over the typical mental health app. In fact, Unite the Realms ended up with over 2.5x the long-term retention of top mobile apps, and is in the top 15% of mobile games in terms of retention! Not only that, but we showed that in 72% of days when people played the game, they also completed real world tasks. And since over 80% of those tasks improved users’ moods, that’s a lot of people we helped!
Based on a prototype idle game, we showed that we could motivate pediatric populations to fill out daily mood diaries in exchange for in-game rewards. Over 50% more participants hit our target response rate when given the game over a normal app. This became the basis of The Guardians Project!
Fast Company
Innovation by Design 2021
Wellness Category
Winner
Fast Company
Innovation by Design 2021
Apps & Games Category
Finalist
It’s like Paradise Island, but a little rougher around the edges. Can you train your pets and save the three Realms from the evil invaders? If you want more Guardians goodness, this is where to find it!