Craig Lund is the CEO of Mightier, an innovative bioresponsive platform that enables some of today’s most popular video games to help children learn self-regulation through fun and play. Before Mightier, Craig was the Chief Commercial Officer at 1366 Technologies. He received his Master of Business Administration from Harvard Business School in 2008.
1) Mightier is grounded in a decade of development. The initial concept started in 2009 as a research project at Boston Children’s Hospital. What is recognized as one of the most surprising and/or important findings during Mightier’s history thus far?
One of the big challenges in mental health, in general, is translation. Think of an 8-year-old sitting in a chair next to a therapist going through deep-breathing exercises together. Consider that child is now on the playground and somebody knocks an ice cream out of their hands; for them it is likely difficult to call upon that coping skill. That’s because what looks like it may work in a very contrived setting doesn’t apply to the child’s real life. One of the most surprising findings is that our intervention does seem to apply. In early trials, we saw stress at home in the active groups decline dramatically relative to the control.
I’d say one of the more interesting things, at least scientifically for me, is our solution is not giving kids an emotional lobotomy. Instead, it is more putting them in a space where they can actually learn to use skills and navigate the real world in a productive way.
2) An intriguing facet of Mightier is how children build mastery through immersion of the intervention, as opposed to adults who are generally led through mastery by way of instruction and progression. What are some of the considerations specific to designing game play for children that are meant to build mastery?
Kids are very visual, much more so than us adults. We somehow get a bit ossified in some of our learning. There is power in learning through play. You know, play is not accidental. It’s not just some interesting side part of a child’s life. Play is really a root of discovery for a child and a lot of learning as a child is their interaction with the world. As such, with Mightier we do not force the child to do anything. Instead, we create this emotional playground where they get to try different things. They get to explore and discover for themselves what works. Discovery through play makes the learning more powerful.
Standard psychotherapy with kids is like trying to teach a child to ride a bike by throwing a manual at them. It’s all words-based. It’s all text. It’s all didactic. What we really aim to do is give kids that emotional bike. We give them the tools, put them on the bike, they feel the sense of balance, they figure out how to move forward and navigate on their own — it makes the learning more powerful. Again, I think play is the root of why kids carry these skills into life.
If you are engaged in what you’re doing, what you’re learning, then you’re more likely to retain it. Play is really a way to make kids care about what they’re learning. Learning through play builds faster neural connections then other types of learning. For example, there were so many bad educational video games developed in the 1990s and 2000s. The way I would classify basic designs from that era are putting an educational element in the way of what the child really wants to do. For instance, let’s say the child wants to enter a castle and find the golden jewel inside the castle. The way a lot of educational designers would build the learning component is as an interruption of that flow, e.g., solve this math puzzle and then you can go through the gates of the castle. The task is totally out of context and is essentially forced on the child. Our aim is to never do that.
Deep breathing is a good example. There are skills that are really hard for kids to learn. We don’t sit there and say “OK Johnny, you’re in the app today. Let’s do a deep breathing exercise.” What we do is, in a moment when the game’s getting harder, game play is also reacting to the player’s heart rate. What does that mean? It means as a child’s heart rate is going up; the game is subtly fighting back against the kids’ progress until they’re able to self-regulate. Imagine something like a Mario Kart where your heart rate begins to climb. You start to lose a little bit of control of the wheel as your heart rate increases, and that effect builds over time … the child can still play, they can still move forward and it’s in those moments where we give the child an option to try something new. In this case, it would be something like deep breathing, but the choice is totally optional. If they opt in, they go through an exercise to learn to deep breathe. And if they don’t like that task, they never have to do that one again. What we find is because the learning’s meaningful, they make the choice to learn because they get to see for themselves that it works.
3) People who are critical of digital therapeutics and cognitive training often reference the concept of specificity — the idea that any benefit from training generally is specific to the mode where the training took place. What elements of the program have been developed to assist a user’s ability to benefit from their learned skills outside of gameplay?
As we have been discussing, the nature of the learning is really important, right? If I say to you “Hey, let’s just sit in this experience and you just got to take deep breaths.” It’s totally out of context from when you might ever use this skill, which is kind of how therapy operates. We don’t just throw a child in the intervention. What we do is we put the child in varying contexts and see if there’s the ability of the child to navigate different stressors in more productive ways as they move through the program.
We put a lot of “scaffolding” around Mightier as well. One of the really powerful things that we try to build into the child’s family language and the child’s family life is the use of gate language. Gate language serves two purposes. Nobody likes to be told to calm down, so all the language that’s built into the game — red zone, blue zone, your gizmo, your skills. The language is all de-stigmatized, positive, empowering and it’s all established on the child’s terms.
That vocabulary that is developed through game play starts to take hold inside these homes, in fact, we really encourage it. We encourage multiple people to play in the home. We encourage families to develop some of the common language. What we found is that this really can help produce a little bit of life scaffolding around the kid. Instead of telling your child to calm down you can say, “Hey, what do you do to get back into the blue when you’re in Mightier and you’re A game?” This kind of dialogue is an opening for parent interaction and can also help reinforce some of the skills developed from the game.
The first component is not isolating game learning from the way we test and build a skill. What we don’t say is, “OK, here’s game A, play it for three months.” Instead, we put a child in a variety of settings over time and measure the overall efficacy of the intervention based on the child’s ability to then move into a similarly stressful challenge. In an environment outside the game, we measure whether the child is able to respond to a new situation in a more productive way.
4) In some respects, consumer digital health technology has failed to impress because many products have been designed to simply “observe and report.” Mightier is part of a new class of consumer health technology that not only collects data but also supplies the intervention. How do you see this space evolving over the next five to ten years?
Take the field of mental health — right now you can have a child who’s sitting in a therapist chair and you get a very subjective analysis by one human who I would argue is biased about some amount of improvement for your child. You have got a diagnostic intervention and reporting all wrapped into one person’s head. I think one of the really powerful things about combining both the intervention and evaluation process together — in a more objective system, if you will — where you can record a lot of data longitudinally across large population sets, is you begin to start to see what really works. To contrast it a bit with traditional biotech, this is in a way like a molecule that can keep iterating and getting better over time.
So the more kids we have in our program, the more data we have to make predictions about the population about how they respond to the intervention. The ability to connect it all the way through to outcome is really powerful, particularly in the field of mental health.
I think the Fitbits of the world struggle with this. It is data without meaning — little actionable data is created. So, sure, that’s great to tell me that I’ve taken a certain number of steps. Maybe it’s motivating in some regard, but it’s also not necessarily, it’s not a new concept that taking steps is beneficial for your health. What is more inspiring is tech that moves users into an intervention that can actually help them and then closes the feedback loop. When the loop is perpetual, we learn to get better over time. In Mightier, when kids see that signal on the screen and they’re in the red or something’s happening, the data is meaningful, right? It’s telling them to do something new that they haven’t done before and training them in a new way to deploy a new skill, which then can be tied to a meaningful outcome.
5) When your competition for attention is Minecraft and Fortnite, how are fun and play considered with respect to creating an engaging user experience?
Our technology sits on the top of other games. Our vision as a company is, there’s no reason we can’t partner with some of the best content providers in the world. I think good games naturally tax certain executive functions through play. That’s why they’re interesting. Essentially, you’re trying to train somebody to handle life’s challenges, right? And really good games mimic that with different types of challenges.
As such, part of our strategy is to build an amazing content library. When playing games has a positive effect on a child’s behavior, parents rightfully view it as a very positive thing and might give their kid a little bit of extra screen time. The child is viewing this result as gravy — that they get to play more video games.
We have a group of kids called Mighty Makers. It’s about 100 kids that do all of our beta testing. It’s really fun. We put our tech out into the wild to see if it is engaging. We also measure the data. We see how it’s coming back, and we make sure it’s causing the right response. Fun and the efficacy, you need both pillars. Too many companies I think certainly ignore the importance of fun. There are some games that have not done well on the platform because they weren’t fun or did not create the right amount of tension to create learning opportunities for kids.
