Chris Kyme: Postcard from Hong Kong

Chris Kyme continues his “Postcards from…” series and this time his topic is back to the real world…

Having just returned from a month’s vacation (have never gone away for so long before…if I’d stayed away much longer people might have started thinking I was French) it takes a while to actually tune back in to work and life.

After such a trip you get home and wonder what has changed in all that time. Not a lot to be honest, although I did notice that a tree outside the gates of where I live had had its leaves trimmed, so that was something different.

So there I was picking up on all things work, and I came across an interesting story I thought I’d like to share about a very meaningful project here in Hong Kong, through an ex-colleague and fellow industry mucker Jeffry Gamble (pictured left). Jeffry of former DDB Hong Kong fame, now CCO of mcgarrybowen Greater China.

Jeffry told me about Critical Core, a project his agency has initiated to help children on the autism spectrum in the form of a role-playing game. According to mcgarrybowen, today almost 1 in 60 kids are affected by autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Although every child is unique, there are common challenges including social interaction, dealing with changes to routine, grey area thinking, and perceiving verbal and nonverbal expression.

These are problems every parent of an autistic child has to deal with day by day, and can present enormous challenges. So what’s the big idea of Critical Core? Gavin Cheng, who is Head of Innovation at mcgarrybowen explained “Most interventions for autism are targeted at younger kids, are very pricey, and require 1 on 1s with therapists. Critical Core can help multiple kids at once, can be used at home or in the clinic, and gives parents a chance to connect and share experiences with their children.”

Jeffry also gave me a bit more background, and for him, there was a bit of personal experience which triggered the thinking. “I have two nephews that are on the spectrum so for many years now I have worked with a number of organisations to try and raise awareness and donations, but I always felt we could do more. So I put a brief to the agency to come up with an idea that can truly help children on the spectrum.”

Which is where Gavin, an avid Dungeons and Dragons fan who runs games with his kids and their friends, got an idea. “It so happened one of the parents of the kids in my game group is a Clinical Director, and I asked her what could possibly help, and her answer was this game. So we started doing more research and asked a few more people about it and got a lot of positive responses to the idea. So we started developing it.”

So the concept of the game was born, and the rules and required interaction of which are all based on research into the special needs of autistic children, as Jeffry explained:

“The idea is to create an innovative rule set to the classic table-top role playing game that helps children on the spectrum to develop critical social and problem solving skills as they play through the game. For example, one of the many challenges involves a puzzle that cannot be solved by a single person, forcing social interaction.

The rule set is developed along the established DIR child development model. The game is a tool that parents can use at home to give their children a safe sandbox for them to test out new things which maybe be scary for them to try in the real world.   We have had professional therapists run a number of test groups already and the results are extremely positive.

That was about 3 years ago now, and they’re ready to roll it out. If you’d like to help support it, check out their website here. Or Like it on their Facebook page.

Jeffry summed up their high hopes as follows: “Success is quite simple for us, if we can help a single child, which we have done with our test groups we will be happy. But long term, obviously we are hoping for a successful Kickstarter campaign, this way not only are we getting sets to the people that need it, but raise valuable funds for the  future development of the system.  We have partnered with a non-profit organisation in the US called Game to Grow, the thinking is with the funds we raise on the Kickstarter, they will then develop new adventures for the game, get more sets out to people that need it and help train other professionals to use the set.

For us this was always about creating a sustainable long term model to keep developing new game campaigns (adventures) and to help as many people as we can, that is why we are launching it on Kickstarter and partnering with Game to Grow.”

Good work folks, creative brains working really hard for a good cause, which is quite refreshing in this day and age.

Chris Kyme is Co-founder and Creative Director at Kymechow, Hong Kong

VIEW CHRIS KYME’S JULY 2018 POSTCARD