Pet abandonment is often seen as a heavy topic, but students at Mahasarakham University found a way to make it approachable: a personality quiz that reflects fears like being abandoned or ignored through pet characters. What follows is based on our interview with the student campaign team, who shared the inspiration, design process, and unexpected impact behind creating the “ค้นหาความกลัวการถูกทิ้งของคุณ” project on OOOPEN Lab — a campaign that reached 244K plays, 150K completions, and sparked nearly a million views on X.
Why We Started with Stray Pets on Campus
As a fourth-year student at Mahasarakham University, majoring in Communication Arts and Faculty of Information Science, I have a social impact campaign as part of my coursework. The stray cat problem on campus is a common issue, but many people may not realize that the primary cause is students abandoning their pets upon graduation. Therefore, we devised a campaign project to raise awareness through a personality quiz game, targeting teenagers.
From Core Fears to Animal Mirrors
We believe that no one wants to be abandoned, and don’t you think that pets feel the same? Using a game with shareable results on social media is an effective way to spread this message to as many young people as possible.
We began by surveying our target audience’s fears, such as abandonment, ostracism, and control. We then matched them with animals that reflected these emotions. Starting with animals first could lead to a lost message. The most time-consuming part was designing questions that weren’t too direct. We couldn’t simply ask “Are you afraid of being abandoned?” because it would be easy to guess. Instead, we used various scenarios to ask questions, and used AI to expand and develop ideas, write multiple versions of the questions, and design visuals. We also created interesting results.
Designing a Playable Quiz: Scenarios, AI & OOOPEN Lab
The OOOPEN Lab platform made it easy to create games by dragging and dropping, setting scores, and tying answers to results, just like making a small game.
We included a thought at the end of the game: “It’s not just us who fear abandonment; our pets feel the same way.” Players seemed to understand our message well. We hope everyone who plays will realize that caring for pets is more important than they think. The number of participants exceeded our expectations, and we were overwhelmed by the sheer number of people willing to explore their feelings. Even more impressive was the fact that many players shared and shared their stories on social media, leading to virality.
What Players Felt & How It Traveled
Instagram was our primary channel for promotion because the target audience loved playing Story games on Instagram, and the results were easily shared, leading to organic distribution through players’ friends.
However, what we didn’t expect was that X (Twitter) had nearly a million views. Players reviewed the game on X, which led to others following and continuing to review it, generating even more widespread exposure than expected. Players’ collaborative efforts through sharing and word-of-mouth made the project even more successful than planned.
Looking Ahead: What’s Next?
For those interested in a similar project, we recommend OOOPEN Lab for creating interactive games. Because it’s easy to use and helps turn ideas from your head into real games. The key is to start with real social problems, understand your target audience, design a game that players can easily participate in and share, communicate indirectly without forcing, and most importantly, make it fun first before adding moral lessons.
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