(Academic) Games for Research

Academic game development: a complicated problem

written by Max, based on two Master projects by Tim in 2025 and 2026

In the first study, we interviewed experts and people with experience developing or designing academic games. Through a thematic analysis we identified nine key challenges and opportunities, including collaboration difficulties, communication barriers, and disparities in gaming experience. We highlight the need for improved documentation, structured collaboration strategies, and critical consideration of how game elements influence research validity. Additionally, we reflect on the potential role of an ‘academic game developer’ specialization to bridge the gap between research objectives and game design, supporting more effective interdisciplinary collaboration. Thus designing academic games for experimental research—and applied games more broadly—introduces a tension between game mechanics intended for player engagement and those necessary to meet research objectives.

In a second study, we developed a academic game in collaboration with the University of Ulm and the Max-Planck-Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences. The task in question that we wanted to adapt was a property verification task (pictures top row) and we reformed it into the "Legend of the Lunchbox" (bottom row). 

Based on the documentation and analysis of the game development process, we conclude that among other things designs must carefully consider that variability between the experience of participants may cause concerns regarding comparability between participants. To this end, designing the game to be linear or using hidden manipulations to force the game state to be independent of the player’s actions could help to limit this variability. Developers and researchers should also consider the use case for the game when developing using the previous strategies, as
motivation of the participants in repeat experiments may suffer from negative biases.

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Note from the Editor:

For more information see for example these two papers by the student - Yeung, T., Friehs, M. A., & Gómez-Maureira, M. A. (2025, April). Mapping practices of academic game development. In Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (pp. 1-11). & Yeung, T., Friehs, M., Kuhnke, P., Hartwigsen, G., Kiefer, M., & Gómez-Maureira, M. A. (2026, August). Between Player Experience and Experimental Control: Designing a Research Game for Cognitive Psychology. In Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (pp. 1-10).

Can making a task feel like a game improve how we perform it - or can it sometimes hurt our focus?

_{by Linus, former student at PCRS in 2024}

In our recent study at the department of Conflict, Risk and Safety, we explored how light-touch gamification - subtle game elements like immersive stories and powerful avatars - affects performance in a cognitive task called the Stop-Signal Task (SST). This task measures response inhibition, or how well someone can stop an already planned and initiated action. We 'gamified' it, turning it into the Stop-Signal Game (SSG), and asked: Can a story or avatar change how people perform? To test our hypothesis, participants were invited to two sessions of playing the game: Once playing a strong and well equiped hero and once playing a weak and unequiped hero; both either chasing after or fleeing from an evil witch hiding in the enchanted forest.

Key Findings:

Story and avatar strength didn’t impact performance: Contrary to our expectations, whether participants played a “strong” armored hero or a “weaker” character, or whether they were told to chase or escape a witch, their actual task performance remained stable.

More immersion = worse performance: Participants who felt more immersed in the game actually performed worse at stopping their responses. It seems the game elements drew attention away from the core task.

 Motivation faded quickly: Across sessions, players reported lower immersion and intrinsic motivation, likely because the narrative didn’t offer enough meaningful goals or choices to stay engaging.

Implications

Our study has shown, that gamification does not always produce performance and motivation enhancing effects. Poorly matched game-like elements can actually lead to contrary effects and distract from a task and reduce motivation. Concluding, gamification does not always lead to improved performance and motivation. Therefore, researchers need to be careful in their design choices and implementation of game-like elements in a cognitive task. Otherwise, performance and motivation, as well as accuracy of results are at risk.

 Interested in more? Read the whole study here.

Imagine you are a general at war: writting letters home

written by Max based on student work by Melina, Nico, Marouscha and Joost who were BSc students at PCRS in 2023 and 2024

People enjoy movies, books or games for a variety of reasons; however, all types of media
are capable of pulling one into their story, eliciting certain feelings, and may lead one to self49
reflect. Some stories even transition mediums; for example the true story of the 101st Airborne
Division who landed behind German lines on D-Day has inspired multiple books (e.g., “The
Deuce” by Symm Hawes McCord or “From Frying Pan” to Mittersill by Jos Groen), a movie from
1956 titled “Screaming Eagles”, and the game “Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30” developed by
Gearbox Software. Although undoubtably each medium approaches the subject matter from a
different angle, the dread of the soldiers in those situations and the harrowing consequences of war are tangible in all mediums. Is this enough to prompt media consumers to be equally empathetic towards the soldiers, regardless of the medium? Thus, in the present manuscript we compare reactions, specifically letters written to the family of deceased soldiers, in response to a simple story in the context of an online survey, a naturalistic game-setting, and historical real-world
examples.

This study involves a comparative analysis of letters about fallen soldiers written in one of
three different contexts: during a survey after reading a prompt, while playing a commercially
available war game, or authentic historical letters written during war-time. We focus on the
emergence of empathy-related meanings in the letter to the soldier’s families across different
mediums.
Findings indicate a correlation between an individual's empathetic capacity, their ability to
immerse themselves in a narrative, and their sense of connection to humanity, as reflected in the
letters dedicated to fallen soldiers in an artificial study context. Moreover, a notable resemblance
emerges between the content themes of letters from an off-the-shelf war-game, those obtained
through the survey, and real historical letters addressed to the families of deceased soldiers. This
resemblance is particularly evident in the emotional tone, the inclusion of soldier details, and the
expression of a purpose. Notably, the primary disparity lies in the prevalence of “humour” and
“insult”, which are more pronounced in the game-generated letters.
Consequently, this study posits that fictional narratives, as encapsulated in gaming experiences,
offer a valuable avenue for probing empathetic responses in the face of extreme scenarios. Through
a mediated reality lens, our investigation suggests that exploring emotional responses within the
confines of a game environment can yield insights into how individuals articulate and experience
empathy in challenging contexts.

For this project they even recorded their own voice-overs in the DIY studio at UT to show to participants.  

This project was carried out in close collaboration with Foolish Mortals games studio, the developers of the game Radio General and the inspiration for this study!

Logging off: what makes players stick around — and what makes them leave?

written by Max, based on a study and Bachelor project by Vi Anh in 2024/25

We tend to talk about "engagement" as the holy grail of game design, and "disengagement" as the thing that happens when a game has failed. However, disengagement is part of any gaming session and any activity; nobody can do a single thing forever without for example drinking or using the bathroom. In this project we focussed on the wildly popular sandbox game Minecraft, and we wanted to know: what makes players start playing, what keeps them playing for months or years, what makes them log off — and what eventually brings them back?

To find out, we ran six semi-structured focus-group interviews (in small friend groups, over Discord) with 15 experienced Minecraft multiplayer players, and analysed the transcripts using qualitative content analysis. We looked at the results through the lens of two classic frameworks from games research: the Process Model of Engagement (initial engagement → sustained engagement → disengagement → re-engagement) and the Mechanics-Dynamics-Aesthetics (MDA) model.

Key findings: Players get hooked initially through social invitations, PvP combat, the game's total freedom, YouTube inspiration, novelty, and the promise of progression. Staying engaged for the long haul is mostly about friends, continued progression, personal building projects, and fresh content. But — and this is the interesting bit — disengaging turned out to be just as structured and just as normal a part of the experience. Players quit sessions because of overplay, painful setbacks (losing your inventory!), real-life obligations, absent friends, stalled progress, skill gaps with other players, finishing a big project, or simply running out of inspiration. Some players even said their friend group kept them playing past the point they wanted to stop — a kind of social peer-pressure that "suppresses" healthy disengagement.

Implications: Rather than treating every dropped session as a design failure, the study argues that disengagement can (and should) be designed for — think reminders, timers, natural stopping points after completed quests, or "waiting" and "blocking" mechanics that give players a graceful way to log off. Because Minecraft is multiplayer, social dynamics run through every stage of the cycle, not just the start — something the original engagement models didn't fully capture. For game designers, and for anyone who studies how people relate to the games (or apps) they use, the takeaway is that a healthy relationship with a game includes knowing how to leave it, not just how to get pulled in.

For more information see: Doan, V. A., Alexandrovsky, D., van Sintemaartensdijk, I., Gerling, K., & Friehs, M. A. (2025). Pixels and people: Exploring the dynamics of engagement and disengagement in Minecraft's multiplayer realm. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 198, 103465.

Can a fairy in an enchanted forest help study a child's brain injuries?

written by Max, based on a three-part research project led by Athena Stein in collaboration with PCRS, published in Pediatric Neurology, Brain Sciences, and the Journal of Cognitive Enhancement (2025–2026)

Roughly one in four children who sustain an acquired brain injury (ABI) — from a concussion, a stroke, meningitis, you name it — end up with lasting attention problems that follow them into the classroom and beyond. One promising, drug-free way to help is transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS): a weak electrical current applied to the scalp that can nudge brain activity in the right direction. The catch is that tDCS needs to be delivered repeatedly to have a real effect, and dragging a child back to a hospital lab for ten sessions in a row is exactly the kind of burden that makes families drop out of research (and therapy). This project asked: can we bring tDCS home instead — and can we use games, rather than dry lab tasks, to keep kids engaged and actually measure whether it's working?

This is where two "gamified" attention tasks developed in the PCRS lab come in: the "Fairy Game," where the player guides an avatar out of an enchanted forest while resisting the pull of an evil witch (a version of the classic Stop-Signal Task), and the "Sorting Game," where players sort food and animals off a conveyor belt. Both measure the same thing — the ability to stop an already-started action — but package it very differently.

Study 1 (mechanistic, single-session, lab-based): Before going anywhere near people's homes, the team first tested whether a single session of tDCS (targeting either the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex or the inferior frontal gyrus) improved attention in 15 children with ABI and 15 healthy controls, while they played the Fairy Game and two other gamified tasks. On average, one session didn't move the needle on reaction times. But digging into individual brain activity (via high-density EEG) told a richer story: kids with certain patterns of "default mode network" connectivity, weaker attention to begin with, and a stronger electric field reaching their brain, benefited more. In other words, tDCS isn't a one-size-fits-all lever — its effects depend heavily on each child's own brain.

Study 2 (feasibility, ten days, at home): Armed with that insight, the team then ran a full ten-day, at-home version: ten children with ABI wore a personalized headband, received either 1mA or 2mA of stimulation, and played the Fairy and Sorting games on alternating days — all while a researcher supervised remotely over video call. The headline result: it worked. Every family managed the setup themselves, all 100 planned sessions happened, nobody dropped out, and there were no serious side effects (just some mild tingling and itching, more so at the higher dose). Brain connectivity measurements taken before and after showed changes in networks tied to attention, and reaction times trended faster over the ten days — encouraging, if preliminary, signs that repeated at-home stimulation could genuinely help.

Study 3 (a closer look at the two games): Since kids played two structurally-matched games during that ten-day trial, the team could ask a bonus question: are two gamified versions of the "same" task actually equivalent? The answer was no. Kids performed measurably better on the Sorting Game than the Fairy Game, and interviews revealed why: kids found the food-sorting game "more exciting" (more stuff to look at, a clearer goal, an emotional feedback character), while some genuinely wanted the Fairy Game's mysterious witch to show up and disliked the Sorting Game's judgmental little monster. A few technical quirks (the Fairy Game ran locally and was stable; the web-based Sorting Game occasionally lagged due to home internet speed) added further noise.

Implications: Together, these studies show that meaningful clinical brain-stimulation research doesn't have to live inside a hospital — with the right game design, remote supervision, and a personalized headband, families can safely run this at home. But the third study is a useful caution for anyone building "equivalent" gamified tasks for research: swapping the skin of a cognitive task (a fairy vs. a conveyor belt) is not a neutral choice. Motivation, narrative preferences, and even incidental feedback characters can shift performance in a supposedly identical measurement — a reminder that in games-for-science, the game is part of the science.