Product Management Internship with Mental Health Video Game Start-Up

The Verse creates games and digital experiences that improve health and wellbeing.

The Verse is a global community of inspired gamers, developers, designers, scientists, artists, visionaries, teachers, and students who join together to passionately contribute their wide-ranging expertise to invent experiences that enhance human flourishing.

Our mission is to collaboratively create digital therapeutics and experiences that are playful, embodied, and ritual-enriched, that invite co-creation and foster participation and that enhance health, improve well-being and raise consciousness. Our guiding principle:

• Human-first Approach
• Collaboration
• Holistic Thinking
• Play, Ritual, Story
• Servant Leadership

THE PROBLEM WE ARE ADDRESSING: In a world embroiled in an ongoing polycrisis, there is a great need (and significant market interest) for solutions improving mental health, well-being and building human connection.

HOW WE CREATE IMPACT: Through our process of ideation, research, prototyping, and testing we guide our projects toward targeted partners and their audiences, seeking always to address vital issues and generate measurable outcomes.

THE WAY OF THE VERSE: We are committed to engaging in work that creates greater happiness, wisdom, and well-being, and relieves suffering in ourselves and others. We think of The Verse as a practice. TheVerse builds games and experiences that improve health and wellbeing! We incorporate mindfulness, contemplation, and prosociality. Our games are fun and have a positive impact on health and wellbeing.

Are you passionate about using games for wellbeing and health? Do you believe in the transformative power of art to heal and inspire? Are you interested in building a "metaverse" for the betterment of humanity? If so, we want to hear from you!

We're currently seeking candidates who are passionate about art, co-creation, community building, gaming, games for change/health/wellbeing, gamification, transformative technology, XR (Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality), game design/development, health and wellbeing, positive psychology, neuroscience, Buddhism, and psychedelics.

If this sounds like you, please get in touch! We'd love to hear about your interests and how we can work together to build a better world through art and gaming. We are looking for people who love creating novel solutions to complex problems.

Product Management Internship

We are specifically looking for driven individuals to join our Product Management team. In this role, you will uncover and understand customer needs and translate them into requirements for our team to execute. You will also work closely with software developers, user experience designers, artists, and storytellers to implement features.

Responsibilities

• Learn Agile/Scrum methodologies and produce tickets (tasks)
• Work closely with multi-disciplined team to define goals and implement features.
• Outline each game’s vision, roadmap, and features in a detailed product specifications document.
• Work directly with the founders.
• Think at a larger scale - considering a product’s scope, size, and success criteria for adoptance.
• Explore new ways to improve both existing and future products/workflow.
• Facilitate the creation and maintenance of proper product documentation.

Qualifications

• Strong technical background or specific domain expertise.
• MUST have exceptional time management, organizational, and communication skills.
• Understanding of Mural, Miro, and/or Figma.
• Knowledge of the Agile/Scrum Framework.
• A passion to create innovative yet achievable ideas for future products.
• Sharp analytical and problem-solving skills.
• An eye for detail.

Culture Fit:

• Interest in wellness and doing work that improves the health experience on a consciousness level.

*Game Based Therapeutics: *

• Adventures In Breath (AiB): Breath is elemental and vital to health and wellbeing. Working with partners, academics and clinicians, we have studied the “sci of breath” and are building Adventures In Breath: an ecosystem of breath based games that use breath as a game mechanic. What is a breath based game mechanic? A game mechanic where you use your breath to interact/move in the game. Each breath ritual ties to a scientifically validated breath therapeutic, and is expressed within the game through interactivity mechanics and responsive design. AiB playifies/gamifies breath therapeutics in immersive game narratives.

• Karma The Six Realm Game: Gamify-ing prosociality! The 6 realms can be understood as forms of existence, or states of mind, into which beings are born according to their karma. The realms can be viewed as situations in life or even personality types. Not everyone goes through the six realms the Same Way. The Journey through the six realms is a Journey through the mind. Game play begins in the “ladder”, where our simple micro game calculates your score based on self interest and prosocial scenarios. This score determines which of the 6 realms a player is born into. In each realm, a player explores game play (cause and effect) through prosocial game mechanics.

*Social Therapeutics: *

• WalkXR: a web app that provides community members with the ability to experience, explore and learn from our individual and collective expressions of our states of mind, emotional states, and aspirations and hopes! What if your company/school/organization could customize trainings or wellbeing programs, that leverage the science of prosociality, and help you become more...
• …Empathetic, Prosocial, & Better on perspective taking
• The Verse’s Social Therapeutics: promote learning and behavior change through the sharing of experiences, perspective taking, and prosocial mechanics.

The Verse

Our distributed structure enables The Verse to organize around smaller, focused nodes of interest that incubate experimental initiatives, while the wider network develops and organizes activities that have a broader scope. We attract people who want to change the world by making an impact on our individual and collective health, happiness and hope.
** We are an organization that requires highly creative and intelligent people who are looking for more. They are looking to develop, express and grow. (self-actualization). **

The Verse attracts and connects makers/builders, artists, visionaries…

• They are undergraduates looking for purpose and meaning,
• They are grad students (MAs and PhDs) wanting to do more with their training and aspirations,
• They are the “dissatisfied and disillusioned” - those who have worked on Wall Street, in big tech and big media.
• They are the academics and clinicians whose work is siloed and who are looking for real world applications!
• WE RECEIVE 100+ applications per month from all over the world (Japan, NZ, India, China, Kazakhstan, +++! )

The Verse is you and me… The Company Of The Future

• Driven by collaboration and community.
• Validated by our ability to build digital experiences in the form of games, art, & therapeutics that shift health and consciousness.

What will you get working with TheVerse?

• Opportunity: Experience building impact games and art based experiences that transform. Be part of building a MetaVerse.
• Visionary Product: Be part of a passionate and committed team that is building games and art experiences that shift health and consciousness.
• Access: TheVerse is working with a visionary group of transformative technology thinkers, innovators, entrepreneurs, gamers, neuroscientists, clinicals, academics, and artists who want to change the world.
• Training: Opportunity to work on a diverse range of projects (game dev, data analytics, product development, biz development, and community building).
• References/Recommendation

Please include your resume, and tell us what you think is interesting about The Verse! If you do not hear from us, please be patient – we are growing rapidly. Info about our projects @ https://versebuilding.com/. Contact [email protected] for more info and/or with any questions! We are always interested in connecting with the right people.

Thanks.
Ben Simon-Thomas
Co-Founder

TheVerse team is 50+ entrepreneurs, artists, and game developers with experiences and expertise (MAs & PhDs) in gaming, world building, metaverses, build in the open, community development, health & wellbeing.

• Ben Simon-Thomas - Founder/CEO. Buddhist-leaning entrepreneur and ecosystem developer. Founded startups in the 3D space (SoundFit: 3D Scanning & ODMS: parts-on-demand), social commerce (GroupGain), worked in health-care startups and life style modification businesses (PMRI). MA in Buddhist psychology, degrees in Religious Philosophy and Language. https://www.linkedin.com/in/bensimonthomas/
• Anshul Pendse - Experience Design/PhD. Anshul is a world-builder, experience designer and creative technologist. With a background in feature film VFX, computer animation, interactive media and game design, Anshul builds immersive, multi-sensory virtual worlds that elicit the sense of heightened awareness, mindfulness and altered states of consciousness. https://www.linkedin.com/in/apendse/