Kinder World Wants You to Care For Yourself
Most people I know, myself included, have a love-hate relationship with mental health apps. Some have all the right features, but come with a high price tag. Some have a handful of what I need with an abhorrent amount of pop-up ads, and still others have activities that I simply struggle to find helpful. It seemed that the perfect well-being app would forever remain just out of reach until, about a year ago, Kinder World exploded on TikTok.
Kinder World is the free-to-play well-being mobile game in which players take care of virtual potted plants by engaging in activities like emotional naming, sending letters to other players, breathing exercises, or a host of other tasks. Kinder World also includes the ability to decorate your virtual home, interact with characters such as Professor Quilliam, Samy the Dog, or Professor Fern, or engage with the game’s community via in-game letters and quests, like the recently added Fern’s Expedition.
The game has been in early access for a little over a year now, and in that time span it has easily stolen my heart as my favorite mental health app. Kinder World is low commitment and driven by giving and receiving kindness—it’s a balanced blend of caring for yourself in simple, approachable ways that I’ve found more helpful than any meditation app. In the wake of my love for this game and the newly-launched community events, I reached out to members of the Kinder World team—CEO and cofounder Laura Clinnick, CPO/CTO and cofounder Christina Chen, Well-being Researcher Dr. Hannah Gunderman, and Brand Manager Jack Railton-Woodcock—to chat about the Kinder World community and what makes it stand out in the mental health app landscape.
Paste Magazine: First, hello Lumi team! Could I start by asking you to tell me a little bit about yourself, your history in game development, and your work on Kinder World?
Laura Clinnick: From data encryption to games marketing, I’ve spent many years in overwhelmingly male-dominated spaces, learning valuable lessons about how to, and how not to, run a successful business. Now, as CEO of Lumi Interactive, along with my co-founder Christina Chen—who has worked on games for longer than I have—we’ve finally been able to put those lessons to good use by carving out a space for people like us to do career-defining work in the most supportive, inclusive environment possible.
We never set out to make “just another game” or even “just another well-being app.” But we ended up working on our first major project together, called Kinder World. This idea actually came about during the dark depths of Melbourne’s record-setting lockdowns during the pandemic, when the world felt anything but kind.
Paste: Lumi Interactive is a female-founded gaming startup — tell me about your experiences being a largely female development team, good or bad.
Clinnick: It’s a sad reality that there simply aren’t many companies like us, here in Australia or abroad, and we often find ourselves in meetings with investors and senior stakeholders where we’re the only women. This issue became extremely evident while working on our seed investment, as we often weren’t taken seriously just because we were women. We even received well-meaning advice to bring a man along to pitch meetings just to have a male presence in the room. Needless to say, we didn’t do that, and we ended up securing a record-setting seed round for Kinder World.
Paste: Now could you tell me the origins of Kinder World—how you came up with the story and the idea behind a mental health mobile game?
Christina Chen: Kinder World was born during the extended lockdowns that Melbourne went through in 2020. Lauren, myself, and our art lead Mandy were the only three employees of Lumi at the time, and we discovered that our mental health was on a steep decline. We knew we needed to prioritize our own mental health, but none of the other products in the category worked for us. They were either too expensive, too time-consuming, or felt too much like homework! This means no 30 minute meditations, and no elaborate yoga routines—just very simple things like daily gratitude, emotional naming, and the occasional breathing exercise. Of all the well-being exercises in the game, we’ve found that emotional naming is by far the most popular, so we’re looking into ways to expand the feature and help players deepen their relationship with their own emotions.
Paste: What was the development process like? In developing a game about mental health, I’m particularly interested in how you might have drawn on any psychological research, personal experience or experiences of others, or DOs and DON’Ts you’ve noticed in other mental health apps?
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