Woodhaven

You’ve receive a series of odd letters and photographs from your old friend Delilah, who tells you an odd tale from her days as a young reporter. When she investigated the appearance of an mysterious ship in the landlocked woods near a small town called Woodhaven, she discovered a mystery far stranger than she could have imagined. Learn more about your friend’s investigation by reading her letters and reconstructing her old photographs.

Game Contents:

• 4 50-piece Jigsaw Puzzles
• 5 Narrative Letters
• Game Instructions

Woodhaven features 5 installments, each with a letter and a corresponding jigsaw puzzle, which are mailed to players. In each installment, players read through the letter and then complete the jigsaw puzzle to piece together more of the mystery. With each mailing players learn more about the strange incidents in the town of Woodhaven.

A prominent model of loneliness suggests that its detrimental effects occur due to a regulatory feedback loop. Lonely individuals perceive the world differently from non-lonely individuals and these perceptions then influence their social behaviors and can make them feel more lonely. In short, lonely individuals interpret benign social situations as more negative, which leads to them avoiding social contact with others.

Woodhaven is designed reduce loneliness in players by disrupting this regulatory feedback loops. Specifically targeted towards lonely rural elderly populations with limited access to technology, each installment of Woodhaven sets up player’s expectations about what will happen in the story, and then solving the jigsaw puzzle reveals something about the story that counters what the player expected. The subversion of expectations in the game trains players to second guess their negative interpretations of social situations in real life—encouraging them to give social interaction a chance.