Popping Up Balloons for Science: a Research Proposal

Some video games were developed to entertain non human animals while measuring their abilities, logged in a file which can be analyzed later. Using such games to measure the limits of such abilities is problematic, as it requires the subjects to be exposed to instances that they cannot solve, potentially frustrating them. Could presenting the subjects with a mix of instances of various difficulties at the same time, and measuring their interaction with those, yield useful information about their abilities and inabilities, without frustrating the subjects? We propose to design, develop and validate a web game presenting several instances at once, inspired by existing ones such as ’Pop the Balloons’, so that the subject can be exposed to a mix of “easy” and “difficult” instances in parallel, and to validate that this does not produce frustration by studying the correlation of the subjects’ assiduity in playing the game with the rate of “difficult” instances.