Paws for thought

London – Serpentine Galleries has launched a mindfulness app about learning to exercise bad feelings.

• Bad Corgi stars a dwarfish demon pup who is tasked with benignly herding sheep and avoiding distraction in a world of chaos
• Artist Ian Cheng developed the video game to encourage people to embrace stress and anxiety in order to be truly mindful

Players of the video game use a corgi avatar to herd sheep around an animated environment that is in constant flux. Each starts with a 100% perfect ranking, but it quickly becomes impossible for participants to maintain this high score.

‘Within 10 seconds of starting the game, it is very likely that you will be negative 2,000%,’ says Cheng, who is fascinated with cognitive science and algorithmic modelling techniques used in the gaming industry. To make matters worse, if someone stops playing the corgi takes on a life of its own, polluting the herd, displacing shrubs and losing points.

‘It’s about eradicating stress and anxiety, and instead learning to deliberately set up and collaborate with those bad feelings,’ says Cheng. In the game players are deliberately subjected to various stress conditions, in which they have no control over Bad Corgi, forcing them to accept the protagonist’s misbehaviour and consider the chaos of life.