Game-Based Behavioral Observation | Healthcare Games Diversifier

The Challenge

Early mental health care depends on careful observation and lots of questioning. That process is slow even with adults, and in pediatrics it's often much harder. Many kids can't clearly describe what they feel, what happened, or how they've been coping.

The result:

Assessments take significant clinician time
Families wait longer for answers and support
Access to care gets bottlenecked by the "information gathering" phase

We want to explore a game-driven way to gather useful behavioral signals outside the clinic, so session time can be spent on care, not interrogation.

The Big Idea

Design a short, engaging game that elicits everyday emotional states and captures observable behavior patterns.

This is not about skill or high scores. It's about how someone plays:

Do they avoid or engage?
Do they persist or quit after setbacks?
Do they adapt when conditions change?
Do they rush, freeze, explore, or ask for help?

Games naturally create challenge, uncertainty, reward, and change: exactly the conditions that reveal these behaviors in a way that feels safe and familiar to kids.

What We're Trying to Learn From Gameplay

Emotional states to gently elicit

These are common "normal game emotions," not clinical provocation:

Frustration: near-misses, small setbacks, repeated attempts
Uncertainty / mild threat: time pressure, ambiguous outcomes, not knowing what happens next (no horror)
Excitement: novelty, anticipation, reward moments, fast-paced sections

Behavioral patterns to observe

We're interested in patterns over time, not one-off moments:

Avoidance vs. engagement: hesitation, quitting, re-starting, willingness to begin or continue
Persistence / frustration tolerance: attempts before stopping, recovery after failure
Flexibility vs. rigidity: whether strategy changes when something stops working
Attention: staying on task across multi-step actions vs. drifting or rushing
Impulsivity / risk-taking: repeated high-risk choices, acting without planning
Observable emotional regulation: after setbacks, do they calm and continue, rush, freeze, or quit?
Response to help: whether prompts/hints are used, ignored, or resisted

Optional Design Direction: Creative / Open-Ended Play

If your team prefers less "levels" and more "sandbox," we can also explore open-ended play (similar to drawing or sand play in clinical contexts):

Building/arranging objects
Creating a scene or space
Choosing characters, roles, or stories
Free exploration without a single goal

What we'd observe here:

What players choose to create
Self-reference or role-taking when narrative is available
How structured vs. chaotic the play is

There are no "right" outcomes. Meaning comes from the choices.

What Data Might Be Useful

Gameplay Telemetry

Teams can log as much or as little as they want. Examples:

Session start/end + duration
Time to first action
Choices made + response time
Success/failure by attempt
Number of attempts per challenge
Pause/idle/quit events
Re-engagement after failure (and time to re-engage)
Hint/prompt shown + whether it was used
"Rule change" moment + behavior after it

Even simple logging can be meaningful if the game is designed to keep behavior interpretable.

Design Principles

So signals stay meaningful

Ramp difficulty gradually
Avoid punishing randomness
Ensure recovery is possible after failure
Keep instructions simple and consistent
Keep sensory load moderate (reduce confounds)

What This Is Not

To keep the goal clear and ethically grounded:

Not diagnosing
Not assigning mental health "scores"
Not a therapy game

Behavior is the output.

The game is a playful, low-pressure way to observe how kids respond to challenge, uncertainty, reward, and change outside the clinic.

Why Game Developers Matter Here

Clinicians know what they want to observe. Game developers know how to reliably evoke it through:

Pacing and difficulty curves
Feedback loops and near-miss design
Meaningful choices under uncertainty
Safe tension without distress
Playful, kid-friendly engagement

This is a chance to apply real game craft to a real healthcare bottleneck, and build something that clinicians can genuinely use as a new kind of "behavioral lens."