Brain Type, the Spring 2025 James R. Chen Award-winning project by Master of Information Management and Systems students Aaron Rodden, Kal Walker, Kimberley Soriano, Omkar Hanamsagar, and Prajakta Pandit, aims to engage communities with an arcade-style video game designed to deliver a pro-social experience. We interviewed the team to learn more —
Describe your project.
Aaron: Brain Type is, first and foremost, an arcade-style video game! To a passerby or someone who decides to stop and play, it will be a fun, immersive, and engaging experience; the secret sauce of Brain Type is that it was designed with social theories from the ground up. The gameplay experience we have players go through takes everything the team knows about community, pro-social design, and human-computer interaction to deliver something that has players get to know the people around them and feel more connected to the communities the game exists in. We believe that designing for community, and even more specifically, physical community, is of extreme importance for our current world.
What inspired your project?
Aaron: Something the I School showed me is that I want to be a part of impacting communities. When I think back to the communities I have been a part of, I realize that strong communities often form around well-designed experiences — from the tried and true rules of basketball bringing together pick-up games and leagues, to music artists forming unique sounds that rally people together in a concert hall. For me, the experiences I cherished came in the form of video games, where I have spent over 10 years of my life in various gaming communities around the Bay Area. When I mustered the courage to go forth with an extremely ambitious capstone idea of not making something that fits around a community, but something that can create a community. I asked myself, and soon an amazing team, what does it mean to design an experience that forms a community?
“We believe that designing for community, and even more specifically, physical community, is of extreme importance for our current world.”
While the perception of Brain Type’s creation was that of a game development squad, its inception was born from wanting to research how communities tick and realizing how design can act as a microscope into different aspects of it. With research and design ambitions set, Brain Type’s (or “accent core game” as it was called for many months) journey began, and at each step of the way, we questioned how a piece of design could impact not only individuals but groups and communities.
What was the timeline or process like from concept to final project?
Prajakta: Our team really benefited from following an Agile process. Creating a game is a highly iterative process, so we had to be extra cautious, given the limited timeframe we had. Although we did kick-off our project with some brainstorming sessions in November, most of the heavy lifting began in the Spring semester. We conducted multiple rounds of playtests and rapidly updated our designs based on the feedback collected. March was a critical month for us in terms of finalizing major components of our prototype, and we wrapped up our research in April, polishing up additional deliverables in early May.
From a process perspective, we split our work into manageable tasks and set realistic deadlines — for example, creating a set of tiles for the background or animating a walk cycle for a character within a week. We used Jira to track items and assign tasks, which helped ensure transparency and accountability, and reduce redundancy. Another important factor was accounting for a buffer — unexpected delays, technical issues, bugs; most issues are solvable, if you have enough time. We did a pretty good job on organization and time management, so we didn’t feel rushed toward the end and we were able to complete all our deliverables with time to spare.
How did you work as a team?
Prajakta: I’m happy to say we gelled really well as a team and we’d love to work together again! We divided our responsibilities with Omkar and me on design, Kal and Kimberley on research, and Aaron handling product management/engineering. We were open to giving and receiving critique, while also giving each member the freedom to work independently and own certain pieces end-to-end. We created a Slack channel for communication and set up biweekly meetings to discuss our progress and next steps, once within our sub-groups and once with the broader team. This helped ensure everyone was on the same page and aligned on the decisions we were making, which was important because we made several changes to the narrative and gameplay along the way.
Another great thing about our team was that we were pretty flexible. For example, if someone from the research side wanted to try their hand at working on a design component, we created those opportunities. While the division of the team was important in terms of allocating tasks and playing to our strengths, we did not want to work in silos and instead collaborated on various aspects of the project. Furthermore, we strongly believe that communication, as well as flexibility, is key!
How did your I School curriculum help prepare you for this project?
Kal: From a research perspective, the I School taught me that anything can be solved with enough iterations and sociological thinking. A big part of our research questions and hypotheses were predicated on social theory we learned in Judd Antin’s Social Psychology class and were tested using the methods we learned in our Qualitative, Quantitative, and UX research classes. The I School has a powerful emphasis on getting you hands-on practice with building and testing products and tying that all back to the grand theories that explain why it works — that’s why it was a perfect fit for a project like this. Without a doubt, I do not think I would have been capable of executing the research we did without that sort of knowledge and guidance passed down to us.
Do you have any future plans for the project?
Omkar: While there aren’t any imminent plans for the game, our group has discussed what Brain Type might look like without a physical presence and in a completely digital format. Making the game completely digital would open the door to adding more creative social features to build an online community — we could imagine this as a Game Pigeon game you might send to your SMS group chat. Furthermore, what made this endeavor so fulfilling is that the findings from the research can be applied to a variety of social systems that aren’t video game-specific. As a group, we’re excited to take what we learned about how to build social translucence amongst a community and apply it to our work going forward. The spirit and ethos of Brain Type will live on as we continue to explore meaningful ways of building and maintaining community — whether that be through video games or other mediums.
How could this project make an impact, or, who will it serve?
Omkar: BrainType can serve local, co-located communities who need some sort of social lubricant. The game is meant to serve as an asynchronous meeting point for community members to feel more connected to their peers. Building a meaningful community is hard, and while BrainType is by no means the ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution to doing that, it can serve as a starting point for getting the social wheels greased amongst a community or even a community-to-be. Place the game on a laptop in the corner of shared space and watch over time as people repeatedly hunch over it to share a bit about themselves and learn a bit about their peers. We hope for BrainType to serve as a matchbox for kindling belonging.
Additional info to share?
Kimberley: Most of us on the team want to work in the gaming industry after graduation, so this was a perfect opportunity to put our I School skills to the test with our project! There has been talk of continuing work on Brain Type as well, so who knows? Maybe you’ll all see an updated version in the future!