Karen is a digital storytelling experience you can enjoy through a smartphone app. She is a chaotic lifecoach with blurred personal and professional boundaries and she develops a relationship with you by asking you questions based on psychological profiling items. 

Karen is a life coach and she’s happy to help you work through a few things in your life.

You interact with Karen through an app. When you begin, she asks you some questions about your outlook on the world to get an understanding of you. In fact, her questions are drawn from psychological profiling questionnaires. She – and the software – are profiling you and she gives you advice based on your answers.

Over the next week you have calls with Karen once or twice a day. Working from home as a freelancer, it soon becomes clear that Karen is slightly chaotic with few boundaries between her personal and professional lives. She contacts you late at night from her bedroom. She overshares and in return is very nosy about you. Before long she is becoming very friendly and wants to speak often. She gets hurt if you don’t call her.

She’s fun and funny, always cheekily pushing her friendliness into new areas. You can decide how open to be and how to handle her inquisitive nature.

She’s recently come out of a long term and moribund relationship. She’s got the rush of adrenaline and excitement of the newly liberated. She’s an explorer, voraciously consuming new experiences, new knowledge and new people during a key transition in her life.

As the experience unfolds, she gets more and more curious. She seems to know things about you that she shouldn’t. Is she spying on you?

You experience her laser focus on you amidst the disconcerting thrill of boundaries being crossed. And, inevitably, you draw lines that she cannot cross. She becomes hurt and begins to unravel. It’s your moment to act as her life coach.

As the story finishes, you are offered a personalised report using your data, a creative interpretation of a psychological profile. Your report shows how you behaved and how the decisions you made affected Karen. You get to compare yourself with other players and to see how the science of psychological profiling underpins the story.

And, if you have been especially engaged, it turns out that Karen is not quite done with you either. Bright eyed and bushy tailed she pops up a week or two later to invite you to a secret rendezvous somewhere in the UK.

Are you interested in meeting Karen? 

Do you want to play?

Karen arrives in the iTunes store next week, on April 16 and for Android users you can download Karen in May. You can find her by searching 'Karen by Blast Theory'.

Karen: An app that psychologically profiles you as you play?

Or does she? 

___________

Karen a new work by Blast Theory, developed in partnership with National Theatre Wales. Co-commissioned by The Space and 539 Kickstarter backers. Karen has been developed with support from the Mixed Reality Lab at the University of Nottingham and in collaboration with Dr Kelly Page.

You can learn more about Karen from the different partners: Blast Theory, The Space and National Theatre Wales. You can also visit the Karen research blog and follow #karenismylifecoach on Twitter.