Chesham, Alvin; Gerber, Stephan Moreno; Schütz, Narayan; Wyss, Patric; Urwyler, Prabitha; Gutbrod, Klemens; Müri, René Martin; Nef, Tobias (22 July 2018). PUZZLING THE MIND: EVALUATING THE DIFFICULTY OF GENERATED PUZZLE GAME LEVELS FOR A PUZZLE GAME INTERVENTION — PRELIMINARY RESULTS. Alzheimer's & dementia, 14(7, Suppl.), P284-P285. Elsevier 10.1016/j.jalz.2018.06.047
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Background:
Engagement in cognitively stimulating leisure activities plays an important role in mediating cognitive decline. Recentstudies suggest that computerized puzzle games are an activityliked by older adults that offers cognitive benefits. For use as acognitive intervention, however, it is crucial that the puzzle gamedifficulty is constantly adapted to match the player’s level of skill.To this end, we generated large sets of difficulty levels for twotablet-based puzzle games.
Methods:
We conducted a play-teststudy in 16 healthy younger adults (18 to 40 years) that playedand rated the difficulty of sets of levels for two board-based puzzlegames: A Match-3 puzzle game (40 levels) that is played by swapping two objects to make a row of three identical objects, and aNumberlink puzzle game (55 levels) where paths to connect pairsof objects on the board must be found. For both puzzle games,sets of difficulty levels were generated using Python scripts byvarying puzzle variables, that is the size of the puzzle board (allcombinations of width and height from 4 to 8) and the number ofgame objects (from 4 to 8). For each level played, a subjective difficulty rating (from 1 to 10) and puzzle solving time were recorded.Furthermore, participants completed neurocognitive tests that measure cognitive domains engaged by the puzzle games and generalcognitive ability.
Results:
Mixed model analyses showed significanteffects of both puzzle board size and number of game objects onpuzzle solving time for both puzzle games. For puzzle difficulty ratings, however, there was only a significant effect of puzzle boardsize.
Conclusions:
Our results indicate that puzzle difficulty can bemanipulated by varying puzzle variables. In a next step, we willtest more participants, including healthy older adults (above 65years), to further examine whether age and cognitive ability areassociated with performance on the two puzzle games. Lastly,this study will allow us to develop an algorithm for dynamic puzzledifficulty adjustment in a clinical trial using the two puzzle gamesas a cognitive intervention.
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