'I don't like the stress of dying': the game for people who don't want to fight

#SelfCare packs a 'tend and befriend' strategy to appeal to players who find combat titles a turn-off. Its designers, Brie Code and Eve Thomas, make the case for staying in bed all day

Eve Thomas, an artist and magazine editor from Montreal, would not call herself a gamer. She played video games on a Mac as a child and enjoyed Super Mario Galaxy on the Wii, but most modern video games don't appeal. "I don't like the stress of dying," she says. "And every single advert for most games presumed me to be a guy. They would presume a certain gaze. They didn't feel like they were speaking to me."

About three years ago, Thomas got in contact with game programmer Brie Code at Ubisoft, one of the world's biggest games publishers, hoping to profile her for a magazine. Code had been spending a lot of time thinking about why it was that the video games she loved were failing to appeal to her friends and, increasingly, to her. "I was getting bored with video games," she says. "I thought it was a problem with me, that I was just growing up and less interested in them. But it wasn't just me. Everyone at work was pretending they were into all the latest things coming out but later, at the bar, they would admit they barely played games any more."