Hi!
Thank you so much for your comment!
I think self-care in game design for me is = empathy? It's difficult to define it, but I think that when you are making game design about self-care for other people is all about you trying to think how the people can feel with this and that.
Game development as meditation is more like an exercise for healing in your inside. It's, basically, another way of taking outside your inner worries.
Thanks so much for the link to the Carewave Manifesto!!!!!
I really appreciate the way you respond;
I guess the empathy concept is really vast and can be developed in different ways according to each person.
In french, we use the word "empathie" (empathy/sympathy) but we also have my fav word "bienveillance" (an automatic translator tranlates it into "benevolence" or "indulgence" but I'm not sure it really fits...). "Bienveillance" is more or less something like "an empathetic behaviour with relationships based on being supportive of others and encourage cooperation". Bienveillance includes empathy, and Mathieu Ricard -a french molecular biologist turned Buddhist monk and writor- said that empathy is something we can learn: it's not inborn, we can develop it by increasing our oxytocins moleculs. And I guess making and playing "empathetic games" is a way to develop it ☺
your answer reminds me another website (I promise, after this one I have no other link to send), with "tool kits" about empathy in game design. I find the documents really clear and it's a nice introduction into "bienveillance" in games.
I think I understand when you say "game development as meditation" ; i'm pretty sure there's a real impact on the mind ; maybe when you make games you produce more molecules of a certain type... that's an interesting subject and i hope to find informations about that (accessible to everybody and not in a complex scientist langage ahah), if you know anything about that, I'm hear to read you
(thanks for reading me)
