Rosario Azzarello

Circolino is a bundle of five Serious Games and self-built input devices to play games while making a range of different physiotherapy exercises. Every time the children play Circolino, the system logs very important information for the therapy and then save it in a well formatted CSV file to be used for analyzing the progress of every singular patient.

This Serious Game was made for the Children`s Rehabilitation Center of Affoltern (Switzerland) and is adapted to children under 12 years old with motoric functions problems.

Playing is something that the human race always did. For this reason playing games is a very important part in the life of every one of us. Games are part of our culture as well and it doesn’t matter which one.

Sadly not all people are able to play video games. There are people that have problems with motoric functions and the most of these are children. Normally, physiotherapy involves helping children achieve their gross motor functions, and enabling them to develop their physical independence. The Physiotherapists assess, design and carry out stimulation exercises for children to improve their physical skills, and to prevent further deformities and minimize the effects of disability.

Helping children with physiotherapy is quite different to helping adults, from an anatomical, physiological and psychological point of view. To treat children effectively all these issues need to be considered.

My first step to create this game was to analyze together with a Physiotherapist the different exercises that these children executed every day. After that, I’ve collected all the important information and wrote the GDD (Game Design Document). While writing it, I’ve paid attention to all aspect of the game with the ‘eyes’ of these children. It wasn’t as easy as we can image. The most of these children have motoric problems not only because the muscles are not good working, but because the brain of these have some problems too. For this reason I wanted to create mini-games that help to train the different parts of the brain too and not only the muscle: they must work together.

The mini-games of Circolino train these parts of the brain that are used to memorize, to calculate, to recognize, to see and to hear: parietal lobe, frontal lobe, temporal lobe and occipital lobe.

The self built input devices let to train the motoric while playing these mini-games. I’ve created something that has this ‘Wii style’ thing going on and giving a whole different gaming experience than just ordinary keyboard or mouse. The most of these children can’t hold any controller in the hands, just because they have problems to move it too. My objective was to create something to wear, not so heavy, easy to install and to use. To use these input devices we need to just plug-in the USB cable and we are ready to play: no extra drivers to install and compatible with the most operation systems.

Last but not least: the children love Circolino!

I was very happy to use my knowledge to create a game that is focusing on a target audience that not always is considerated in the game industry.

To create Circolino I’ve used Blender for create the game and the 3D assets (environment, characters and items), Python for scripting it, Gimp for the textures, Inkscape for the 2D game elements, Audacity for the Sounds and the Music, and Scribus for the documentation.