Swatee Surve interview: Showing gratitude to your friends in a game

Posted byby Dean Takahashi
March 19, 2022
Updated June 19, 2025
7 min

Swatee Surve has been working on games that can improve mental health for more than 10 years. She is still at it, and she has added a new minigame called Gratitude to the mobile game Sinasprite that she launched a decade ago to help patients manage problems such as stress, anxiety, or depression.

Starting in 2012, Litesprite created a game called Sinasprite, which used a fox character named Socks to go on journeys through an animated world. I wrote about the company years ago and caught up with Surve at the recent DICE Summit event in Las Vegas.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.