EcoRescue
Action game for adolescents, built for a University of Geneva anxiety study funded by the SNSF and the European Research Council. Players depollute planets across galaxies; the gameplay data feeds longitudinal research on anxiety and attention.
Challenge
The core tension: the game had to be genuinely fun for teenagers, or the intervention data would be meaningless. But every session also had to produce clean, structured behavioural records for a longitudinal study. Fun and measurement pull in opposite directions. Solving that meant designing gameplay loops where the data collection was invisible: timed events, accuracy tracking, and session metadata logged continuously without interrupting the experience.
Technically, this required a statistics and event system that captured task performance at the moment of action, not reconstructed from replay, and serialised it cleanly to formats the research team could ingest directly. Session integrity was non-negotiable: a crashed session with partial data is worse than no session at all.
The collaboration model with UNIGE and HES-SO shaped how we iterated. Researchers defined the measurement targets; my team at FCBG translated those into game mechanics and instrumentation. Every design decision had both a player rationale and a scientific one.
In use
Runs as part of a three-site cognitive study across Geneva, Haifa and Miami, feeding longitudinal research on attention and anxiety.