Objective

​​​​​​​

Our objective is to build a video game that tests cognition in a rich and powerful way while ensuring that the experience of the participant is as engaging and enjoyable as possible, allowing them to perform at their best. The game will facilitate a rich array of measures that go beyond simple performance accuracy and speed and that allow us to discern the range of strategies and approaches that characterise the rich varieties of cognitive processing.

​

​​​​​​​

People interact with their experiences of the world in differing ways: perceiving, learning, remembering, solving problems, and making decisions using a variety of approaches, strategies, and skills. Cognitive tests are designed to capture this variety and to explore ways in which problems and difficulties associated with mental illness may be understood. Such testing can shed light on the underlying changes and can be linked to symptoms in important ways.

​

But such tests are often problematic: they can be tedious, repetitive, and, to the person doing them, can feel unengaging and meaningless. This means that it can be hard to pay attention to them and to perform them optimally. Furthermore, they often provide on sparse and simple measures, such as accuracy or reaction time, when the processes that we wish to explore are in fact complex and rich.

​

We believe that cognitive testing can be enhanced by taking lessons learned from video game design. Video games often place the player in a puzzling or challenging situation, creating a narrative to engage attention and enjoyment and asking the player to use their cognitive skills to navigate, solve problems, learn associations, and, in fact, do many of the things that cognitive tests seek to measure.