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:

• Co-design consultations with 50+ older participants — focus groups, in-depth interviews, and walkthroughs of early platform sketches.
• A qualitative survey with 150 older people to broaden the sample and validate themes from the consultations.
• Co-design sessions with exercise physiologists and occupational therapists, used to develop the recommended games list and the tailored physical advice that would sit alongside the challenge.

The strongest signal across consultations and surveys: 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. The EP/OT sessions surfaced the games and movement patterns that mapped onto the kinds of activity the program was trying to encourage.

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.
• 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”.