I was wondering whether there could be value in using a game to devise an experiment coupled with a questionaire to derive meaningfull data about correlations between daily habbits of study participants and their degree of neuroplasticity (ability to adapt and change structures in their brain).
I was thinking of something like getting a number of people to beat a challenge like they normally would in the game, to establish a baseline for their “skill”, and then invert one axis of the controls that they are really used to, and measure the time they take till they are able to beat the challenge again. I was thinking of e.g. letting people play Quake 3 Arena on q3dm17 and find out on what skill they still can beat the map on easily 3 times in a row, with a fraglimit of 10, then invert the y-axis on the mouse, and measure how long till they can beat it 3 times in a row again. And as a last step capture the measured times and data about their daily habbits in a questionaire.
If the sample size is large enough and datamining shows correlations between certain habbits and shorter times to adjust to the new control scheme, one could poke some proper scientists about it to look into it further with a more standardized and supervised test setup under lab conditions, and a differently biased sample of participants.
Sounds like an interesting use of Unity analytics. You would have to account for the high number of RAGE quitters! I’d probably be one of them, even before the Y axis was flipped.
Actually in a lab environment that could be a really interesting thing to measure the time till people give up. There have been studies done where study participants where divided into 2 groups and given hard math problems to solve and the time till they give up was being tracked. One group had tasty food in their pre-test waiting-area that they were not allowed to eat, while the other group had no such factor to excersize willpower on in their waiting-area. The group that had to show restraint before the actual math test even begun, on average gave up earlier on the task they had to perform. The conclusion was that willpower is a depletable resource. It would be really interesting to see if daily habbits correlate with differences in the availability of willpower/perseverance-related resources in the brain.
In terms of games, I’m more interested in the concept of games as ‘performative therapy’ for lack of a better term. Basically the idea that games, by putting a player in a narrowly contextual situation with the ability to act in certain ways, can give them an opportunity to strengthen certain psychological attributes, such as positivity, decisiveness, concentration and awareness.
I think most games only work in the most primitive way for this sort of thing (maybe concentration?), which is why I’d like to see them put players in more difficult and nuanced emotional or moral contexts.
