Sea Hero Quest

Sea Hero Quest allowed researchers to study the gameplay of over 400,000 people. Now, in a new paper, they’ve used that data to determine one factor that might hurt navigational skills: growing up in a city with a regular street grid.

At first glance, Sea Hero Quest is a completely unassuming mobile phone game. Its mechanics are simple: You’re a boater, given a map to memorize. When the map disappears, you have to rely on recall alone to steer your vessel to the points you’re given.

In some levels, you have to find buoys hidden deep within mazes of ice; in others, you have to capture sea creatures on camera. But your success is based off about how well you can get around the virtual waters. That’s because for the first five years it was available, Sea Hero Quest was actually a science experiment, testing players’ spatial navigation by their age, country, and much more (with their knowledge).

Traditionally, a neuroscience study might involve a few dozen participants. But Sea Hero Quest allowed researchers to study the gameplay of over 400,000 people. Now, in a new paper, they’ve used that data to determine one factor that might hurt navigational skills: growing up in a city with a regular street grid. The results were published in the journal Nature on March 30.

“It’s very hard to generalize the findings that you make based on a limited population,” says Antoine Coutrot, a neuroscientist at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Lyon, France, and one of the paper’s authors. ”I think video games are … an interesting way to collect more participants from more, different backgrounds.”

Collaborators from several groups in Europe, including Alzheimer’s Research UK, Deutsche Telecom, and the University of East Anglia in England, initially created the game to help diagnose dementia. Neurodegenerative conditions eat away at your memory and capacity to find your way from place to place.

But just because you’re bad at directions doesn’t mean you should be concerned. There are many external factors, from your upbringing to your lifestyle, that can influence how well you can navigate. That’s where Sea Hero Quest came in: Its creators hoped they could use it to build a global baseline. The game asked its players to answer questions about their age, country, and more detailed matters, too, including how long they tended to sleep and the sort of environment they grew up in.

“At the beginning, our initial aim was just to collect 100,000 people’s data, which we thought, at that time, was wildly optimistic,” says Michael Hornberger, a dementia researcher at the University of East Anglia and a coauthor on the paper. “We collected 100,000 people in the first two days after the game launched.”

Sea Hero Quest is no longer available to the public, but when it was, nearly 4 million people from all over the world made it through at least one level. While most of them didn’t play beyond that, close to 10 percent spent enough time on it to leave a treasure trove of information on their spatial navigation abilities—along with their demographics.

“We found out very quickly that, this data, you can use it for many different purposes,” says Hornberger.

The neuroscientists decided to scour for any patterns they could find. Unsurprisingly, regardless of where they lived, people tended to perform worse as they aged. But the team also found that the power to navigate correlated with a country’s wealth: Players from areas with higher per-capita GDPs scored better.

Gender seemed to play a role as well. Neuroscientists have seen that men are often better at navigating than women, but they aren’t sure why. Sea Hero Quest indicates that the size of this disparity correlates with a country’s rank in the Gender Gap Index: Women who lived in places with more gender inequality tended to score more poorly than their countrymen. Coutrot and his peers published those results in a 2018 Current Biology study.

Later, they wondered if the type of neighborhood a player grew up in would have any effect on their performance. The researchers began breaking down that data, which was provided by around a quarter of the game’s users. Those who grew up in rural areas or in suburbs tended to do better than native urbanites.

Source: Popular Science

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