The Diabetes Game is a game to help individuals learn to balance their carbohydrate intake with insulin levels. The goal of the game is to be the first person to get 20 victory points, where victory points are acquired by gathering meal cards. This is analogous to real life, where an individual has to eat carbohydrate-rich food, but only if they can balance their glucose and insulin levels effectively to properly metabolize that food in their body.
This game was inspired by a desire to help individuals diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes learn how to navigate food, exercise, and insulin injections. We spoke with a team of pediatric nurses who specialize in Type 1 diabetes care, and they shared with us how confusing and complicated it can be for families managing this illness to understand how to monitor their food intake, measure out their insulin injections, and calculate all of this against their physical activity in a day.
We designed the game to be a simple yet effective way for people with and without Type 1 diabetes to learn about the interplay between food, exercise, insulin, and glucose. Part of our process of creating the game involved understanding how different card games work and borrowing some of their tactics to try to create something that was competitive yet educational. After completing our first prototype and playing the game, we found that the main mechanisms that we were hoping to demonstrate came through, albeit with a few minor things that need adjusting. It taught us the complexity of game design -- making something clear, engaging, addictive, and competitive is not as easy as we thought!
We hope to try our game with the same pediatric nurses who shared with us their experience in working closely with parents, teachers, and caregivers of children with Type 1 diabetes to get their feedback so that we can continue to iterate on the game design.