The number of meaningful human connections happening in the world is in free fall.

This includes everything from thanking the person who just made you a coffee to catching up with neighbours over the garden fence; from saying good morning to a fellow walker in the park to being part of the local pottery club; from arranging a meet-up with your parents to spending uninterrupted quality time with friends.

Instead, we swim in a sea of convenience, where human interaction is increasingly seen as friction that has to be removed, and where time spent with other humans has been commodified into time spent on platforms designed to keep people scrolling.

The results of this free fall are many.

• The loneliness epidemic continues to grow, with young people reporting record levels of loneliness and anxiety

• We don't join clubs in our local communities as much as we once did, removing cultural norms that kept us invested and engaged in where we lived and who we lived among

• We become vulnerable to digital platforms that provide only an empty echo of connection, and that are built on keeping people isolated, angry, distracted and dependent

• We make excuses not to see friends and family in real life, weakening ties to those best placed to help us

• We can meet our daily needs without having to interact with another human, never needing to engage with people different from ourselves, contributing to polarisation and limiting our own growth

If we don't reverse this crisis of connection, it becomes harder and harder for us to come together to solve the biggest challenges we’re facing.

But we can do something about this, using an unexpected medium

We're most likely to respond to learnings and nudges when we're in a state of play. And mobile games have an insanely large reach, with over 3 billion people playing them around the world, across all demographics.

So imagine a game that isn't designed to keep you trapped in yet another digital ecosystem, but instead takes you on a journey from isolation to participation, making itself largely obsolete in the process.