About Project
Client: Posit Science, Brain Plasticity Institute
Subject: neurological brain training game
Period: 2012
I was enrolled by Posit Science and the Brain Plasticity Institute to create an over-arching game theme for a series of brain training exercises aimed at improving people’s cognitive skills in memory, attention, and social interaction.
SocialVille was the result: an interactive game framework designed as a narrative to walk people thru a series of tasks involved in arriving to a new city, “SocialVille”, interacting with various character personalties, and gaining points, “friends”, and awards by completing sub-game brain training exercises. SocialVille is targeted at serving patients in hospitals, who would be recommended to play brain training games for small amounts of time each day over the course of several weeks or months, ultimately improving their cognitive abilities.
My Task
I led the overall game design, working with a small team of neuroscientists and technical developers to produce the final game system. I conducted extensive research in understanding the goals of the Posit Science business, objectives of the scientists, and needs of the end-users (patients). I created use cases, wrote a game outline, and worked with the entire team to brainstorm ideas for games themes, game mechanics, features, and functions. Once the “SocialVille” theme was clarified, I crafted interactive storyboards, system schematics, wrote functional and technical specifications, resourced art and graphical assets, designed complete interface layouts, and coordinated with Flash developers on the programming of game mechanics, and the completion of the final brain training game system.
Result
SocialVille was distributed to various hospitals, helping 100s of patients improve their cognitive abilities.
- SocialVille brain training game framework
