Designing a Mobile Game That Develops Emotional Resiliency in Indian Country

Communities in Indian Country experience severe behavioral health inequities [11, 12]. Based on recent research investigating scalable behavioral health interventions and therapeutic best practices for Native American (NA) communities, we propose ARORA, a social and emotional learning intervention delivered over a networked mobile game that uses geosocial gaming mechanisms enhanced with augmented reality technology. Focusing on the Navajo community, we take a community-based participatory research approach to include NA psychologists, community health workers, and educators as co-designers of the intervention activities and gaming mechanisms. Critical questions involve operation of the application across low-infrastructure landscapes as well scalability of design practices to be inclusive of the many diverse NA cultural communities in Indian Country.