WW 11 - Places & Spaces: Growing your own forest

Krish Shrikumar on gaming as a tool for meditation, wellbeing, and personal development

Hello & welcome to the next edition of Wellwatching, an exploration of the places and spaces - both physical and digital - that help us feel well. You can read previous interviews here. 

I’m always interested in talking to people who are working at the intersection of wellbeing and the built environment. If you know anyone, please send them my way!

In this latest conversation, I am grateful to have spoken to creative multi-hyphenate and meditation devotee Krish Shrikumar. In addition to his award-winning film and VFX work, Krish is the founder of Vismaya, an Edinburgh-based creative studio that explores meditation & mindfulness through gaming experiences and storytelling. As part of this, Krish created Playne, a video game which invites players to “grow a beautiful island with mindfulness and build a daily habit of meditation.”

Given the rise and rise of gaming - and virtual world-building and entertainment more broadly - while negative perceptions of its consequences persist, I was interested to get Krish’s perspective on how our virtual worlds can be healthy, safe spaces for personal development. We talked about how, when leveraged thoughtfully, gaming can be a powerful tool for learning, healthy habit development and even a stronger connection to our physical environment.

Tell me a bit about yourself: What do you do?

I’m a filmmaker, 3D visualiser, and the creator of meditation video game Playne. 

Simply put, Playne is a video game set on an island forest that helps players learn and build a daily habit of meditation through a series of exercises and lessons. Players progress through the game through meditation: when you meditate in the game, the forest around you grows a little bit. As players continue to come back and meditate, they essentially transform a barren island into a lush forest. At the same time, they also learn about the benefits of nature for mental and physical wellbeing.

How did the idea for Playne come about? 

I grew up in a big city in India. My father was a landscape architect and meditation teacher; my mother was an Indian classical dancer. When I was younger, I really rejected meditation and nature, but when we emigrated to Scotland in my late teens, things started to change. The challenges of moving to a new country forced me to turn inward, and so I looked to meditation to help. At the same time, moving to Scotland inspired my appreciation for nature – I remember a particularly special trip to the Orkney Islands, which were so enchanting. These interests continued to deepen in my 20s and 30s, as I learned more about meditation and spent more time outdoors with my wife, who loves hiking.

I started seriously looking at my wellbeing about six years ago, when I was running a stressful e-commerce business with my brother. The work took its toll, and I decided to focus on creating a healthier life for myself. As part of this journey, I wanted to create something that expressed my appreciation for meditation, through my preferred media of film, gaming and 3D visualisation. One day I thought: why don’t I try to create a game that helps others to deepen their meditation practice too? And that’s how Playne was born. 

Why did you decide to use a video game format to educate people about meditation, over another creative storytelling medium?

I love the opportunities for storytelling and world-building in video games that you can’t really get with film. When we watch film, our minds travel into the worlds of the characters we’re following – but with games, you can quite literally step into the shoes of someone else, which can offer players a renewed sense of self and autonomy. 

Games are also really powerful teaching tool; as a player, you have a lot of choice in terms of what you’re interacting with and learning. You can define your character, make choices that affect your character and the storyline, and ultimately direct the game’s outcome. At its best, a game can be a really unique and empowering personal journey of growth and discovery.

How do you think that Playne can improve people’s wellbeing? 

The game occupies a slightly strange space, in that some gamers don’t consider it a ‘real’ game because it’s about meditation, while some meditators take issue with the perceived gamification of meditation. That said, I think it’s proving to be a force for positive change. 

Playne is very deliberately set in nature, as my experiences in the outdoors have been integral to my own wellbeing journey and sense of self. Playne’s forest is the expression of this journey; it's an expression of growth itself. As such, it’s attracted a wide variety of people who are starting to discover more about their inner worlds, and helping connect more people to nature in the transformative ways that I have. I’m sure I’m sure it helped that Playne’s popularity has risen during the past 1.5 years of lockdowns, when nature became everyone’s primary source of freedom and wellbeing at a difficult time. The best thing that I’ve heard on Playne’s Discord is, ‘Because of Playne, I went for a walk in nature yesterday and now I feel so much better.’ 

Tell me more about your audience. Who’s playing Playne, and why?

As I mentioned, the players are really diverse. On Discord, I’ve observed a 17-year-old boy who found Playne to be super helpful to deal with anxiety during exam time. Another player who regularly visits the hospital said that Playne helps him cope with the stress of waiting for appointments. And then there is a 70-year-old grandmother who plays to help get herself to sleep. She’s one of Playne’s most prolific players, and supports me on Patreon.

Regardless of their differences, Playne players share the need to improve their wellbeing in some way. For them, gaming is a comfortable medium through which they can explore meditation and mental health to help them achieve that. It erodes the misconceptions that gaming is the domain of teenage boys, and that wellness is a pursuit of rich women. I’m proud that the diversity of Playne’s players reflects the increasingly mainstream cultural awareness of wellness.

Video game stereotypes – that they cause violence, addiction and isolation, to name a few – suggest that they’re quite detrimental to our health. How is gaming evolving to be a force for good? 

I think the concerns around video games are valid, in the same way that we should have a healthy skepticism of all media. That said, I think video games are more nuanced than what we often see in the headlines. I think the opportunity within gaming experiences to help people self-actualise is massive and still largely untapped. We’ll increasingly see that games aren’t simply about play: they are an excellent medium through which to learn, grow, heal, and deepen self-knowledge.

It’s incredible that, if someone needs a respite from the physical world around them where perhaps they feel a lack of agency or control, they can enter a virtual world and interact with people who understand and share their interests. They can create what they want to see. They might feel more seen or understood in these digital environments; they might find a sense of belonging and identity that they lack elsewhere. 

This is true for physical health too. For example, hospitals in the United States are starting to experiment with gaming and VR technology therapies to help patients deal with pain. This is a powerful use case of technology that’s typically been relegated to entertainment and communication: it can help with the perception of pain and allow patients to travel outside of their current reality. 

To summarise, it can be good for people to connect with the digital world to get that sense of belonging, but it needs to be mindful. The question is, can this ‘digital’ environment encourage us to connect with the physical world?

What's been your biggest wellbeing breakthrough over the last year?

Over the past six or seven years, I’ve researched and come to understand what works for my personal wellbeing, rather than relying on blindly accepted wisdom about wellbeing. Thanks to books, YouTube and a wealth of other resources available online, we can all learn more about wellbeing and find people who are on a similar journey to ours, and going through the same trial and error cycle as you.

In addition to my ongoing meditation practice, which is prodomentaly rooted in ‘self-inquiry’, specifically from teachers like Nisargadatta Maharaj and Ramana Maharshi, to learn how to turn inward and understand myself. I’ve also enjoyed practical, science-based wisdom from the likes of Dr. Robert Sapolsky.

What does wellbeing mean to you?

For me, wellbeing means to really know yourself. I don’t think I will ever have complete self-knowledge, but that’s not really the point – I enjoy the continual process of exploring myself through meditation, study and other pursuits.

To learn more - and get gaming - check out the Vismaya and Playne homepages, the Playne Discord channel, and Krish’s other creative pursuits.