''Sea Hero Quest'' is a mobile game which contributes to research on
dementia. It was designed by independent British game company
Glitchers in 2016 in association with
Alzheimer's Research UK,
University College London and the
University of East Anglia and with funding from
Deutsche Telekom
Deutsche Telekom AG (; short form often just Telekom, DTAG or DT; stylised as ·T·) is a German telecommunications company that is headquartered in Bonn and is the largest telecommunications provider in Europe by revenue. Deutsche Telekom was ...
.
The idea for the game came from neuroscientist Michael Hornberger of the University of East Anglia who collaborated with Hugo Spiers of University College London, Antoine Coutrot of
CNRS
The French National Centre for Scientific Research (french: link=no, Centre national de la recherche scientifique, CNRS) is the French state research organisation and is the largest fundamental science agency in Europe.
In 2016, it employed 31,637 ...
and a group of six other neuroscientists.
The game was designed to help researchers to understand the mental process of 3D navigation, which is one of the first skills lost in dementia. It was hoped that a large number of people would play the game, thus contributing much more data than could easily be obtained in a laboratory experiment.
The plot of the game involves a sea journey taken by a son in a quest to recover the memories his father has lost to dementia. There are three sections: navigation, shooting flares to test orientation, and chasing creatures. Each has been "carefully crafted to be as fun and exciting as it is scientifically valid".
It was named "App of the week" by
BT. It won nine Cannes Lions at the 2016
International Festival of Creativity.
By February 2017, the game had been downloaded 2.7 million times.
In August 2017, Sea Hero Quest came in a
virtual reality edition.
The game was nominated for the 2018
British Academy Games Awards, in the new category "Game Beyond Entertainment" for games which "deliver a transformational experience beyond pure entertainment".
At the
2018 Webby Awards The 23rd annual Webby Awards were held at Cipriani Wall Street in New York City on May 14, 2018, which was hosted by comedian and writer Amber Ruffin. The Webby Awards have been dubbed the "internet's highest honor" and, in 2018, received over 13,00 ...
, it won the award for "Social Impact". It was also nominated for the Coney Island Dreamland Award for Best AR/VR Game at the 2020 New York Game Awards.
The game was used in research into the influence of childhood environment on navigation ability; it was found that "growing up outside cities appears to be good for the development of navigational abilities, and this seems to be influenced by the lack of complexity of many street networks in cities", while "the countryside is a rather complex environment in that it is very unorganised, with greater distances, meaning you have to memorise your route". The researchers developed a variant of the game, ''City Hero Quest'', to test how well city-dwellers got on in cities.
References
External links
*{{official website, http://www.seaheroquest.com/en/
Virtual Reality version website
Mobile games
Alzheimer's disease research
Citizen science
2016 video games