A test case for GameDNA: Conceptualizing a serious game to measure personality traits

There is a growing interest in using serious games to uncover personality traits of people for job assessment. The disadvantage of the old paper questionnaires and interviews is the risk of giving socially desirable answers. Accommodating assessment in a game can provide a richer, less repetitive and more immersive context in which players might act more natural and intuitive. In order to design games for structured assessment existing methods do not sufficiently accommodate interactions between game and player and the players´ mental states and actions during play. We need better ways to visualize cognitive aspects within a player. A Game Studio, a Computer Science department and an HRD consultancy firm cooperate on developing GameDNA, a richer notation and visualization tool for serious games involving assessment. This software tool will enable different stakeholders to conceptualize, communicate about and develop such games more effectively. The second aim is the development of a serious game to measure the personality trait “Compliance” (a hot topic after global financial crises in financial services) as a live case study for GameDNA.