"We designed this to provide advice that’s aligned with ethical standards"
Goodville's Katerina Dudinskaya reveals how AI characters can help make games that are good for your state of mind.
Hello! Welcome to the latest AI Gamechangers, featuring an insightful conversation about the beneficial things AI characters can be used for.
Plus, we have a few choice news headlines from around the web. Are we still talking about DeepSeek? Probably. Scroll to the end to find out.
But the main event this week is our chat with Katerina Dudinskaya, chief marketing officer at Goodville, the wellbeing-focused farming simulation game. Our conversation explores how Goodville uses the AI character Sarah – developed with the World Health Organisation – to subtly blend mental health support into the game, demonstrating how AI can make therapeutic elements feel natural and engaging rather than clinical or forced.
Katerina Dudinskaya, Goodville
Meet Katerina Dudinskaya, chief marketing officer at Goodville. Goodville was launched in 2020 and is a top-five-grossing farming simulation with a unique twist: it has content produced with the involvement of psychiatrists, psychologists, and neuro-physiologists, intended to improve the player’s emotional wellbeing. Goodville has partnered with the World Health Organisation for three years, and in December, it introduced a new AI assistant, Sarah. Sarah is designed to help players understand their health while offering actionable tips based on the WHO’s guidelines.
Top takeaways from this conversation:
Integration must be organic. Goodville realised that AI helpers need to feel like natural parts of the game world. Success came from making the AI character, Sarah, context-aware and integrated with the overall experience. The team work hard to balance entertainment with health benefits.
Partnerships with organisations like the WHO are complicated but valuable. The partnership provides credibility and expert knowledge and demonstrates how games can contribute to public health research, but also requires important safeguards.
Data insights create new opportunities. The non-personalised data from the game helps the WHO understand global mental health trends, while in-game features can double as assessment tools for therapists. Goodville shows how games can gather valuable insights and help people while maintaining privacy.
AI Gamechangers: Can you tell us a little bit about your background? What was your route to the games industry?
Katerina Dudinskaya: I’ve worked for more than 10 years in the IT “niche”. I transferred from the media and more traditional marketing. I worked as a brand manager on localisation, adaptation, the brand books and the whole brand strategy for the local market.
Then I transferred to gaming and continued my career into the gaming niche. I worked at Easybrain, I worked at Gismart. And now here I am working with the ex-founder of Melsoft, Alexey [Meleshkevich], on Goodville, the primary and main title in our company.
Please tell us a little bit more about Goodville. What’s the story behind it? How would you describe Goodville to someone who hasn’t played it before?
It’s really interesting because Goodville is a unique blend of a farming simulation game (like the well-known Hay Day and others on the market), but with the plus that it’s designed to promote mental wellbeing while entertaining players.
The whole idea, actually, was discovered in the COVID period. We all came to understand how important your mental state is for everyone in the world because we lost all those activities that we usually did and we just stayed at home. So, in this period, we thought that we needed some additional help – but not in a straightforward way, not directly, because your mental state can still be a very taboo theme to talk about. Disasters, diseases, and issues: they may still not quite be regular things for people to talk openly about.
We thought it would be a really good idea to put that type of help inside the game because everyone likes playing and having fun! We needed to add additional value that people would obtain while having fun – that was the idea, and it’s really helpful in many ways that Goodville is based on research. We have our own Science Board that provides evidence-based psychology practices in Goodville and helps us to ensure that the whole integration is helpful to our players.
That leads us neatly to the role of AI tools in the game. Please tell us about the launch of “Sarah” and how that AI character integrates into the game.
It’s not very easy to integrate a helper inside a game, especially if you’re working with an organisation like the WHO. You need to be a million percent sure that you’re able to work with that type of organisation.
It’s the biggest challenge to ensure that Sarah feels like an organic part of the game world. It’s not easy to create a personality that is more helpful and empathetic without disturbing the player’s farming experience because we understand that the players want to have fun.
Her previous version, Florence, was a bit too straightforward, giving direct information about health. “You need to do this, this and this…” But that’s not helpful. So we worked on making Sarah’s conversation more context-aware and more emotionally intelligent, ensuring the core persona complements the exciting gameplay.
It [mustn’t feel like it’s coming from] outside of the gaming world, but organically grown in Goodville with other characters, her character being aware and knowing what’s going on around her in the game. This is the major part of her integration inside Goodville.
What can you tell us about the technical side of how Sarah works? What foundation model are you using?
Our structures are pretty similar to transformer-based models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. We make the interactions more unique because we fine-tune the model using our own custom data sets. We align it with the full information that we have from our Science Board, and we can combine their psychological best practices with the information that we already obtained from the WHO.
“I hope that players and the whole world allow AI assistance to become more personalised and more adaptive to their real-time issues”
Katerina Dudinskaya
Florence was primarily an informational assistant, just delivering the health knowledge directly: very straightforward. Sarah, on the other hand, is more interactive, adaptive, and designed to engage players in conversations.
In general, we learned how important personalisation is and how important it is to align responses with the player’s emotions. We understood that if we did not have this upgrade, we would obtain the same results as we did with Florence. Those lessons shaped Sarah to be a dynamic, conversational companion.
How did the WHO’s expertise influence the way you work with Sarah in the game?
They provide the information that we need to include in this whole conversation that Sarah provides to people. The whole thing is certified by the WHO. This partnership covers all the issues that we may have in the future.
It’s a really sensitive thing to work with an organisation, especially if it’s all directly connected with people and health. We avoid a lot of things! We designed this collaboration really carefully.
You might talk with Sarah or with other characters. It’s not only one person who provides wellbeing or health information in general. We have our own character, a therapist who lives near the main character, Jane; inside his house, you can connect to a self-assessment test, and many more interesting things.
We tried to design this really carefully to provide non-diagnostic, supportive advice that’s aligned with all ethical standards in all the markets where we are represented.
There are a lot of mental health issues, and Sarah doesn’t say things like, “You probably have depression, maybe you need to do these three things every day!” But of course, the WHO provides all the information about what a person needs to do to avoid depression or how to ease ADHD, for example, and many other psychological issues. We cover all the straightforward things, more in the form of advice.
Sometimes we have very interesting conversations with the people who work with us from the WHO side, and they may think we can be more direct with our advice, but we understand that’s not a “game” form of conversation between the characters and the players. But those meetings [with the WHO] are really helpful, and every time we improve something with Sarah’s character, we have day-to-day operations with each other.
When you’re talking about a sensitive area like health, you have to make sure the AI is giving ethical and responsible advice. You must have safeguards and guardrails built in?
We’ve put a lot of years into this blended niche between gaming and mental health. We consulted with ex-workers of the FDA in the United States, and they provided us with reviews, and news that we did in the past, to be 100% sure that we meet safety standards.
We are still exploring a potential Q-Submission as a De Novo product to the FDA, which would validate Goodville’s effectiveness as a digital health tool in the future. So, we demonstrate our commitment to ensure the game operates with a secure and robust framework, and it’s definitely not going to harm our players or their mental health.
“The feedback indicates that nearly half of our players have some type of low-key condition… We need to provide something to help them with their happiness and freedom”
Katerina Dudinskaya
Because Goodville is connected with the WHO, we already have a huge database to help understand how people feel, in whatever countries Goodville is available.
It’s all secure and non-personalised data. We understand that, for example, people in a particular country have additional anxiety points or are struggling with depression or another condition. We can share our knowledge with the WHO to help them understand the whole situation in the world. In their emergency activities, connected with COVID and wars, we can help them understand what people are feeling in different regions. We share the experience and knowledge from Goodville, thanks to Florence and now Sarah.
Goodville is also there for fun, right? How do you make sure you deliver a balance?
Goodville is designed to be a balanced product between two niches. For example, we have a very unique feature: the chicken house, which doubles as a spatial virtual memory test. It looks like a mini-game, such as you find in any competitor title. But we put values into the mini-games in Goodville. This activity is framed as fun, an optional challenge, but it’s designed to assess and prove cognitive skills like memory and attention.
It’s a really hard mission for us, and we’re still trying to blend these different worlds inside Goodville. But we’ve seen its positive impact. People interact with the self-assessment test in the therapeutic block inside the house, every day, every week, every month (not all the tests are available every day).
This is also part of the game retention curve: create a feature that engages your player for the whole of their lifetime. It’s not just a game feature; it’s a mental health feature connected with your ability to know more about yourself.
Obviously you can’t betray any confidences, but have you had positive feedback from individual players?
Yes, we have. We have one feature – it’s a small cat. And if you talk to the cat, it helps you to harvest crops on your paths and complete your tasks faster. We got feedback from a family that has kids. They have problems with their hands, and they cannot do a lot of things connected with the phone. This feature has already helped them as an accessibility feature to interact with the game more easily; it’s helping.
We also have great feedback on the whole mental wellbeing feature. Recently, we got feedback from a person with clinical depression. She took the test, connected with Sarah, with the chicken house and more, and relaxed during the farm experience: harvesting the crop, growing the animals, and many more things, including the storytelling. She told her therapist, and he asked her to share everything with him, to improve their therapy.
We’ve got the assessments: PHQ-8, GAD-9 [Patient Health Questionnaire, General Anxiety Disorder]. You can get it from your therapist while you have a session. But you cannot have a session every day. You probably have one per week, maybe two, but not every day. (And, of course, the holiday season happens when your therapist might not work for weeks!) But if you have those types of conditions, you need help 24/7.
[Goodville is] already helping to improve the structure of her therapy. [The therapist] understood, because it’s certified results, they would probably be the same if she were in his room. She shared it with him, and he understood the alignment and what he needed to do to improve her therapy. It’s already helped her.
That must be very gratifying, as the game’s creators, to know that it’s helped.
Yes. The feedback indicates that nearly half of our players have some type of low-key condition. Maybe they’re not quite in a fully depressed state. We understand that 2% of all our players are in a depressed state. Half are completely fine, everything is good. But 48% are still in those grey areas. Sometimes they are fine, sometimes not good. Every time we understand that a person in this 48% group might go towards the 2% group, we need to provide something to help them with their happiness and freedom.
“We fine-tune the model using our own custom data sets. We align it with the full information that we have from our Science Board, and we can combine their psychological best practices with the information that we already obtained from the WHO”
Katerina Dudinskaya
When we get this type of feedback, we realise it’s important to continue our mission. We can create some sort of new integration, like our collaboration with the WHO. We started to work with AI a bit earlier than the whole AI hype started! If it can help us to do our work more effectively and provide our users with more useful information that can help their mental state and increase their happiness, we will do it.
You’ve been working with AI for a while. Looking ahead, what do you think the future holds?
I hope people will stop fearing AI. We are seeing that now because AI has developed very fast. People fear this thing and think that perhaps in the future, there’ll be a war with robots, like in a sci-fi movie! It’s been a theme of movies for the last 50 years.
But I hope that players and the whole world allow AI assistance to become more personalised and more adaptive to their real-time issues. It can provide help directly and in exclusive and precise ways. I think it will be really interesting if it can be more personalised. It can be transformed into a companion. It’s needed, especially on the topic of mental health. I hope the gaming and health industries can be enabled with this dynamic content generation and be more adaptive at scale.
Further down the rabbit hole
Your selection of this week’s news from the universe of AI and games:
DeepSeek took the AI world by storm at the end of January, with one of its shocks being the cheap cost of training: just $6 million, allegedly. However, this appears to have been deceptive, with a number of sources chiming in to put the cost closer to 400 times that. Oops.
Mind you, researchers at UC Berkeley then claimed they could replicate DeepSeek’s performance for just $30. And Stanford University said it could challenge OpenAI for just $50 in cloud computing costs (although they used responses from Google’s Gemini 2.0 in their training).
Talking of models, Moonshot AI introduced Kimi AI 1.5 this week, which is touted as being superior to GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet. You can try its chat interface here.
Sam Altman posted about the roadmap for GPT-4.5 and GPT-5, and Elon Musk says Grok 3 is nearly upon us.
Meanwhile, “low-effort, AI-generated garbage” was reportedly a problem on the PlayStation Store, including an AI-generated Animal Crossing clone, until Sony stepped in this month and banned “a ton” of them.
Event news! A new one-day conference about AI in the creative industries, AIMI, is set to take place in Brighton, UK, on 6 March 2025.
At the start of GDC week in San Francisco, USA, 17-18 March 2025, PG Connects will feature an AI track again this year.
And the grand AI Summit returns to London, UK, on 11-12 June 2025. Tickets are available now.
Treasure has debuted Mage, a gaming-focused AI agent launchpad powered by MAGIC, as part of a broader trend in 2025 where numerous web3 projects are developing AI agent initiatives (BlockchainGamer.biz is keeping track).
In the same sphere, decentralised network KGeN and AI verification platform Mira Network have partnered to develop AI agents for games using a gaming-focused large language model. KGeN will gain access to Mira's APIs and verification framework to enhance its POG-E AI engine.
The superb performance of Troy Baker as Indiana Jones in Bethesda’s recent game has prompted Harrison Ford to take a pop at AI. “You don’t need artificial intelligence to steal my soul,” said the veteran actor to a question from the Wall Street Journal about digital likeness rights. “You can already do it for nickels and dimes with good ideas and talent.” SAG-AFTRA continues to campaign for artists’ rights in the face of AI.