Stay in the Game

ACH Group, funded by the South Australian Government’s Wellbeing Strategy, wanted to run a statewide video game challenge for older South Australians, promoting physical fitness and social connection through gaming. I joined the Innovation Service Design team to lead research and co-design, design and manage the platform, and shape the brand that ran across the campaign.

Older adults aren’t typically considered gamers, and the team wanted to find out whether a serious-games initiative could deliver real health and wellbeing outcomes. The harder question was design: what would it take to make an experience that didn’t feel patronising, didn’t assume technological incompetence, and gave older participants reasons to keep showing up beyond a single sign-up?

I facilitated research across three groups, around 200 participants in total.

• Co-design with 50+ older participants, run in person in ACH aged care homes and community villages. Focus groups, in-depth interviews, and walkthroughs of early platform sketches, working from a framework I built with clinicians and with a helper taking notes so I could stay with the participant rather than the page.
• A survey of 150 older people, distributed through ACH’s village email network and targeted Facebook ads to reach beyond the people already in ACH’s orbit.
• Co-design with exercise physiologists and occupational therapists, which turned into the most useful sessions of the project.

Recommending games to older adults on a fitness program is a clinical question, not a taste one. So rather than pick games we liked, we played through every proposed game with two occupational therapists and mapped what each one was actually good for: strength, mobility, balance.

That mapping became the product. It fed the tailored guide and the game recommendations on the platform, which meant the advice participants received came from clinicians rather than from our guesswork.

The first finding overturned the premise of the brief. The stigma says older adults don’t like games. Surveys and in-person testing found the opposite: they were keen, many already played, and with a little guidance they genuinely mastered them. The job was never to convince them to play. It was to remove the friction so they could.

The second finding explained where that friction came from. Participants weren’t cautious because of technology. They were cautious because previous products had made them feel stupid. From there the design implications stacked up: bigger targets, plainer language, slower transitions, and a tone that assumed competence.

With the team, we reframed Stay in the Game less as a gaming product and more as a social and health intervention with games inside it. That meant the experience couldn’t sit only online: it needed in-person “Arcade” events, a partner network, and a tone that treated participants as adults choosing to take part, not patients being prescribed exercise.

The challenge ran across four pieces, and I owned design across all of them:

• An accessible online registration and tracking platform, built around a challenge portal that paced the six weeks: a weekly schedule with clear steps and goals, so participants always knew exactly what to do next.
• A curated games list and tailored advice from the EP/OT sessions.
• Online and in-person Arcade events, so people could participate however they were comfortable.
• A marketing campaign across TV, newspaper, and social, coordinated with government, community, and business partners.

I ran usability testing on the platform with older users, making sure the thing they were signing up for didn’t become the first barrier they hit. The findings fed directly back in: clearer registration flow, larger interactive areas, and more forgiving error states.

300+ older South Australians participated in the challenge. The marketing campaign reached over a million views. Feedback from participants, physiologists, and partners was overwhelmingly positive, and the initiative proved out a model for how serious games can deliver real health and wellbeing outcomes.

Working with older adults as the core users, not as an accessibility afterthought, reshaped how I think about research. The participants weren’t cautious because of technology; they were cautious because previous products had made them feel stupid. Once that was understood, the design decisions made themselves. Stay in the Game is the project that made me care about serious games, and it’s the reason most of my work since has paid attention to who else could use it, not just who it’s “for”.