Wondershop Entertainment System

Decades of research confirms that chronic violence most often emerges when children grow up in high-risk communities and experience multiple adversities, including a harsh home life, unstable family, lack of school support, deficits in social-emotional competencies, peer rejection, and academic difficulties.

In 2020, there were 407,000 children in foster care in the US. By age of 17, over 50% of foster children will have an encounter with the juvenile legal system, and 25% of youth in foster care will be involved in the criminal legal system within two years of leaving the foster care. Social-emotional challenges are overrepresented among children in child protection system.

Social-emotional challenges are however not limited to any particular socioeconomic background. Approximately 15-20% of children in each age group experience peer difficulties, struggle with social-emotional skills, and exhibit anti-social behaviour. In the US alone, this applies to 7-10M children aged 6-17.

With social-emotional skills, we refer to five domains: i) Self-awareness, ii), Social awareness, iii) Self-management, iv) Relationship skills, and v) Responsible decision-making. Challenges across these five domains are overrepresented in incarcerated population, in other words, individuals with externalising behavior - recent findings suggest that emotional instability and psychological disorder rate in prison is three times higher than in the general population. Yet, lack of social skills and emotional awareness can also result to internalising behaviour such as withdrawal, anxiety, depression and social exclusion. Statistics for isolation are more difficult to find, but studies suggest that up to 50% of children experience “mild to severe loneliness”, and around 22% of adults feel often or always lonely or socially isolated – likely exacerbated by the pandemic and the adverse effects of social media.

In schools, social-emotional learning (SEL) is often integrated into the general curriculum, which poses several practical challenges. Globally there is an increased academic pressure to bridge the academic gap caused by the pandemic, meaning that despite what is envisioned or intended, in practice very little time is allocated or emphasis put on things outside the basic curricula and the children’s performance in standardised tests. The professional training for teachers to meet the children’s emotional needs is glaringly insufficient.

The benefit of SEL for children in child protection system, those who are in neuropsychological or neuropsychiatric treatment, or for those who have experienced significant traumas, is undisputed.  Often the challenge for learning in these contexts is the children’s withdrawal and negative, or even hostile, attitudes towards the adults due to their past experiences. If a bond forms between the adult and the child, the potential success of the intervention depends entirely on this particular adult. Children who have experienced significant traumas also often suffer from developmental delays, such as poor language and vocabulary development, thus impairing communication skills required for complex interactions and verbalising of thoughts and emotions.

We make games for 7-12-year-old children that teach social-emotional skills in a quantifiable, scalable, and engaging way.

Quantifiable: Wondershop Entertainment System (WES) is based on Friendship Group (www.fasttrackproject.org), which is a unique, university-developed and evidence-based peer-to-peer program for socially challenged children, based on over 20 years of research. Our games incorporate strategies proven through Friendship Group that build children’s prosocial skills, and strengthen their self-awareness and self-confidence. Unlike other programs that focus on shaping and managing behaviours, our games promote the social-emotional skills that promote teamwork and collaborative mentality, such as cheering for others, empathy, and working towards common goals. Across all our games and our platform we measure positive social interactions between the players, such as greeting others, helping others, thanking others for the game, trading items and giving others positive feedback, and use them as proxies for team cohesion and social-emotional skill development.

Scalable: We make co-operative games for 2-8 players which are played on a shared screen, in person, as one team, with our proprietary game controller and console. WES can be taken into use anywhere with just a TV screen and a wifi: Children don’t need smartphones, nor professionals working with children need to acquire expensive game consoles to access our games, as we have built our own hardware specifically for impact purposes. Our console and controllers use well-established and cost-efficient NFC and bluetooth technologies in an entirely new and innovative way, but are extremely reliable and robust and work even in the most challenging of environments, such as in rural India. Our games are designed to offer enjoyable and meaningful roles for all players regardless of their age or skill level, promoting team cohesion and collaboration, and avoiding toxicity and harassment which is a prevalent problem in several other video games. Our games can be played under adult supervision for a more intense educational experience, with a mixed group of children and adults, or autonomously by a group of children without supervision. 

Engaging: Educational games often fail to deliver experiences that are entertaining enough for the children to enjoy and come back to over several sessions. We test our games every week with children and ask them to contribute with ideas and feedback – that is why we have become experts at knowing what the kids enjoy and how to create entertainment specifically targeted to them. Our creative inspiration comes from Nintendo, LucasArts and Disney of the 90s: Games should be child-appropriate but never childish. Our platform runs on Unity, and the entire technical architecture has been built in a way that it allows quick and cost-efficient iteration, testing and development. During spring 2024 we are piloting our games in 10+ after school clubs, hobby clubs and in children’s group homes across Finland and India. The 80 children that currently play our games every week repeatedly report being excited, having fun, and eagerly looking forward to the next week’s game club.

Our games are designed for children aged 7-12 who struggle with social-emotional skills, peer relationships, or anti-social behaviour, and they can be played anywhere where children gather with minimal implementation effort.

All children consider our games as fun, engaging, and based on interviews, more friendly and co-operative than other games they play.

For children with identified social-emotional skill deficiencies, our games lower the threshold for social interactions in a group setting and provide a safe ground for natural peer-to-peer skills training.

For school educators, our platform provides a scientifically validated framework for SEL learning in a digitised and scalable form, which is easy, cost-efficient and resource-efficient to take into use, and which the children truly want to engage with.

For social services professionals, our platform provides all the benefits described above as well as an additional tool to break through the child’s guard, to provide a sense of normalcy in a stressful situation, to provide the child with agency, and to have something fun and safe to do together while in the process of establishing trust and mutual respect.

We are well-positioned to deliver this solution for three reasons: Our proven experience with building impact-driven tech, our Day 1 approach to our players and product development, and our world-class advisors.

Wondershop founders met while working at the We Foundation, a Finnish non-profit that strives to diminish social exclusion among kids, youth and families. At We Foundation, we founded and operated a low-threshold, free-for-charge community house for disadvantaged children and families in Helsinki suburbs, and built a proprietary impact measurement system for tracking the changes in well-being among the community members. The impact platform Melvio is currently distributed by the We Foundation and used by 80 communities and over 45,000 registered individuals across Finland.

Wondershop founders have significant previous experience from startups, thus our way of working is highly iterative and explorative. Every day is Day 1  for us, and it is mandatory for us to constantly educate ourselves on children's developmental psychology and to include industry professionals, educators, academics and parents to synthesise our own perspective of the challenge and the end product. We truly want to create a product the educators and professionals want to use: Often video games are considered scary and complicated by those who do not play, and we take that seriously by placing extra emphasis on everything ranging from technical setup to UI and to the product design of our hardware. We also talk directly to the players every week and ask for ideas, feedback and suggestions to make them feel included, heard and respected – we were unable to find a partner to conduct user research with children, which meant that we had to become experts at it ourselves. Despite we’re only a team of four, we hold ourselves accountable to deliver something new for the children to play every week.

Our advisors and board members are Ilkka Paananen and Mikko Kodisoja, two of the co-founders of Supercell, one of the most successful mobile game companies in the world. Based on their experiences from building commercial hits like Hay Day, Clash of Clans and Brawl Stars, we have access to the best game makers and advisors globally who support us in balancing the impact and the fun. Through them we are also expected to properly measure and quantify the success of our game, be it number of players or the impact it generates.

We are piloting the games and validating our impact hypothesis with 80 children in after school clubs and children's group homes across Finland and India during H1/2024 in collaboration with a group of cross-disciplinary researchers from Tampere University (psychology, human-technology interaction, gamification group). The preliminary impact results are very promising, and the final pilot findings will be available by the end of May.

What we have accomplished so far: We have a working console and game controller, a stable technical architecture that allows for remote maintenance and updates, a tried and tested sandbox environment through which any external game developer can build games for our platform, 3 live games, 2 working prototypes, 15 prototypes we decided to discontinue, first version of the browser-based player profile through which the player can access their personal economy and customise their character and to interact with their team members, and a working analytics pipeline for in-game and player profile events. Our players keep returning to the weekly clubs, are visibly excited to play our games, and put positive pressure on us to deliver new content weekly. All our pilot locations have express interest in turning the games into a permanent part of their activities.

We are looking to gain support for impact validation and scalable distribution model, gain mentorship from leading children's developmental psychology experts, get connections for sales, branding and marketing, to receive funding to support the continued product development and productisation of the platform, and to scale our impact even further globally.

Social impact is one of the most complex phenomena to tackle in a scalable way due to GDPR considerations, reliance on questionnaires, lack of objective data sources, and lack of standardisation. Our approach is to just start without getting stuck on the unknown, and we’d wish to see other companies to start solving issues in this space. On our platform we measure positive social interactions between the players (greeting others, helping others, thanking others for the game, trading items, giving others positive feedback) and use them as proxies for team cohesion and social-emotional skill development. These are not standardised measures, but they serve their purpose in helping us continuously develop our product towards increased impact.

Games, children and impact in the same sentence usually create an association with edugames. Edugames tend to fail due to their lack of player understanding. When building technology for children, we adults must avoid being too principled or dogmatic in pushing our well-intended agenda of what we think is impactful to the players. Some compromises are obligatory in order to preserve the fun, as the fun is the core of any impact. Fun has been our core product development principle since the company was founded. In truth, for the first 6-9 months our only objective was to figure out the fun. We test everything with children - in person.

Likely due to a philosophical disconnect between impact and entertainment, the games industry is missing out on a massive potential to use games and gamified experiences in generating measurable good for the society. For the games industry, impact looks serious, solemn and boring. For impact industry, games look like dopamine-inducing nonsense. An ever-increasing number of children play video games or mobile games, the distribution channels are in place, and the psychological mechanisms of motivating and incentivising are well-known, but they are not used systematically or to a full extent for encouraging any other kind of behaviour than purely commercial one. We want to be at the forefront of crossing that chasm.

Educators use WES platform in schools, after school clubs, or special education classrooms as a cost-efficient, scalable and resource-light tool for teaching social-emotional skills to children aged 7-12.

Social work professionals use WES platform in child protection services, group homes and inpatient wards to teach social-emotional skills as well as to bring a sense of normalcy, fun and stability for children aged 7-12 in distress.

Children consider the games fun and thus show increased engagement, retention and exposure toward educational and pedagogical group activities. Feelings of fun, enjoyment and excitement result in better learning outcomes. Children play without smartphones, allowing them to fully focus on the game and the others in the room.

Children play together in-person in groups of eight, which increases the likelihood of skill transference to other in-person interactions outside the game sessions in comparison to playing virtually.

Children are incentivised through proven game design mechanics to positively acknowledge other players, to greet others, to work in teams, to cheer others on, and to show caring and empathy.

Children are incentivised to regularly visit their player profile between game sessions, and to send positive acknowledgements to other players to unlock personal rewards - skins, items, emotes, boosters – which they can then equip and showcase in the next game session.

Children can send requests and feedback on the games through the player profile and new games will be developed based on those ideas – this empowers the children and strengthens their positive sense of self and their ability to make a difference.

In H1/2024, we test our impact in Game Clubs across Finland and India, started specifically for this purpose. Game Clubs last for 8-12 weeks, and the children play once for 1-1,5 hours per week. Children get their own PlayTags and will create their own Player Profile online. Each player will use the same PlayTag during every play session.

Children fill in a 4-question Gameful Experience questionnaire after each session. The questions focus on their social experience during the session, and cover topics such as feelings of loneliness, belonging and contribution. 

Children are interviewed by a university researcher at the beginning and at the end of each Game Club session. The questions focus on their social experiences, communication, behaviour of self and others, and feelings throughout the Game Club. At the end of the interview, children also fill in a 5-question questionnaire that focuses on prosocial behaviour.

There is a staff member present at each session, and they observe the children's social skills and behaviour. For this assessment we use CBCL (Child Behaviour Checklist) and SDQ (Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire) frameworks, which are both globally accepted as clinical diagnostic tools for children’s socio-emotional issues.

In addition, we look at the in-game data and how the prosocial interactions among players develop over time, such as how often the children greet each other, how often they give each other kudos, and how often they perform actions to help others and the team.

We consider our pilots successful if:

- The overall trend in Gameful Experience responses across all clubs is upwards

- The overall trend in CBCL/SDQ observations across all clubs is upwards

- The overall trend in prosocial surveys across all clubs is upwards

- The qualitative findings from children's interviews are positive

- The qualitative findings from adult interviews are positive

- The researchers overall perception of the platform's impact is positive

Our games are developed with Unity and target Android devices.

Our hardware's core development principle is "lateral thinking with withered technologies". We have combined the most robust communication technologies - Bluetooth and NFC - from the past decade in a novel way, to create an experience that is easy to use, cost-efficient and reliable. We have used industry standard PSoCs to reach an extremely affordable BOM+MVA price point.

We use machine learning and behavioural technology to customise player experience and difficulty levels based on teams' progress, to provide encouraging feedback and acknowledgements to every player based on their performance, and to incentivise players towards positive interactions with one another. 

Our team consists of four full-time team members: Three game developers and one generalist. The hardware has been developed and manufactured together with an external, Finnish engineering partner. 

We started hardware development in 01/2021. Development of the current game platform started in 01/2023.

We are a female-founded and female-led gaming company. 75% of our staff are female, 50% of our staff have small children and balance working in a small startup with family life. We offer hybrid working arrangements to make sure that everyone has the opportunity to work where and when they best see fit.

We seek and welcome people from different backgrounds, also outside the gaming and social impact industries, and acknowledge that diverse teams with few preconceptions have the most courage to build innovative solutions.

We raise funds from NGOs, family foundations, CSRs, and awards. These funds support the product and services we provide to governmental organisations, non-profits, educators and social work organisations free-of-cost. We report our impact to our donors, who make funding decisions based on impact created.

Moving forward, we have the opportunity to engage in contract-based work to make custom games based on client requests.

We also have the opportunity to explore the commercialisation of our hardware and services in the B2B domain.

1. Decrease hardware cost even further by building capability to connect the controllers directly to any Bluetooth-supported device and to stream the games directly to the screen, thus removing the need for a dedicated console.

2. Continue assessing the impact with an external research organisation and improving the product in quick iteration cycles based on findings.

3. Expand in-house impact team to establish donor relationships an to improve impact reporting.

4. Raise funds from family foundations / high net-worth individuals with background in games and who do philanthrophic work in the social impact space, and from global game companies with CSR budgets. Our funding  so far has come from Ilkka Paananen's and Mikko Kodisoja's foundations, both of whom are successful Supercell founders and entrepreneurs.

5. Develop a pipeline for research-based funding through the creation of a GDPR-compliant databank on social-emotional wellbeing of children, gathered through in-game and player profile activities as well as digital questionnaires.

6. Explore commercialisation of our hardware and platform services in B2B domain through license fees.