System Design Evolution of The Prepared Partner: How a Labor and Childbirth Game Came to Term

How do you help a woman in labor? The Prepared Partner is an educational video game about labor and childbirth, intended to teach mothers, birth partners, and everybody else about different natural ways to help a woman in labor. In the game, the player sees up to 50 nonpharmacological pain relief, comfort, and relaxation methods that he or she can suggest to the mother — and can help her have a satisfying birth. We present a partial taxonomy of childbirth in video games, and a discussion on skill selection and its effect on agency as motivation for the system. Through iterations of design decisions involving specialists across several vastly different fields, we present a simple way to model a woman in labor. We show that frequent interdisciplinary collaboration was key in making The Prepared Partner an educational game; that the review and re-assessment considered the system as a game, as an application, as a user interface, and as a mathematical model of a laboring woman. The overwhelming majority of positive survey responses speaks to the success of The Prepared Partner as an enjoyable learning aid. We attribute its success to the close ties we had to both the childbirth professionals and the usability and game design experts during all stages of design and development of The Prepared Partner.