Stress through Story: Participatory design for Gamified College Wellness

College students face persistent and often unpredictable stress that can undermine academic performance and well-being. While digital wellness tools commonly use gamification to support self-care, many rely on rigid reward systems that emphasize task completion and sustained engagement rather than adapting or managing stress. To address this gap, this paper uses playful research probes based on narrative board games as a collaborative medium within a participatory design study to examine how students collectively make sense of stress and translate those interpretations into design expectations through role-play. We adapted a narrative tabletop role-playing game for focus groups (N=30), where participants enacted fictional stress scenarios and collaboratively explored design possibilities for a digital mental health application. Session transcripts were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis, with themes interpreted through the Mechanics–Dynamics–Aesthetics (MDA) framework to understand how participants reasoned their design choices in the context of stress. Our findings show that participants preferred flexible, low-pressure mechanics and consistently rejected guilt-based feedback. Emotionally safe structures that supported optional, peer-anchored reflection were strongly valued. Static features such as leaderboards and streaks were widely described as demotivating or anxiety-inducing, highlighting the importance of autonomy and contextual relevance. Participants emphasized experiences centered on meaning-making, shared reflection, and choice without penalty rather than performance or compliance. This work contributes to CSCW by showing how participatory narrative role-play can function as a design inquiry method for surfacing shared interpretations of stress, negotiated coping expectations, and preferences for socially supportive but non-coercive wellness design.