Video games can be a very successful way to do citizen science, getting ordinary people involved in research. Sea Hero Quest is an extremely successful example. It involves a boy setting out on a sea quest to recover his father’s memories, lost when he suffers from dementia. The hundreds of thousands of people joining the quest have helped researchers better understand our ability to navigate.
The Sea Hero Quest project was led by Deutsche Telecom, working with both universities and Alzheimer’s Research UK. The first mass-market game of its kind, it has allowed researchers to explore navigation and related cognitive abilities of people throughout their lives. The game has 75 levels, each with different kinds of task in different environments, and has been played by millions of people around the world for over a 100 years of combined game time. The amount of data collected is vast and would have taken researchers centuries to collect by traditional means, if possible at all.
For example, an international team including researchers from UCL, the University of Lyon and the University of Münster used the game to explore how the place people grew up affects their ability to navigate. As well as more general data from around 400,000 people across the world, they also used the data specifically from people who had completed all levels of the game. This amounted to around ten thousand adults of all ages.
They found that people are best at navigating in situations similar to where they grew up (where they lived at the time of playing the game had no effect). So, for example, people who grew up in an American grid-like city such as Chicago, were better at navigating in grid-based levels. Those who grew up in cities such as Prague in Europe, where the streets are more wiggly and chaotically laid out, were better at levels needing similar navigation skills. Throughout, the researchers found that those that grew up in the countryside were better at navigating overall as well as specifically in more unstructured environments.
Sea Hero Quest shows that games designers, if they can create fun but serious games, can help us all help researchers…It is often said that playing video games is bad for growing brains but it also shows that the way we design our cities affects the way we think and can be bad for our brains!
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