Psychometric Games to Assess Understanding, Development and Ability

We’ve shown that psychometric testing can be carried out in a more cost effective and insightful way in virtual worlds through observing players’ behaviour. PlayGen has developed a series of psychometric serious games and now offers a powerful set of tools and methods that can help you assess your users on core competencies, identify development needs and target support.

Personality tests and psychometric testing have a wide range of applications from employee selection to development, team building and training. They can also be used to help predict the way somebody will behave in particular situations. However, there are a number of issues with current methodologies:

• Multiple choice based tests can prove unreliable as the person taking the test can easily manipulate the answers to portray the image they desire.
• Face to face interviews give a more accurate portrayal but are substantially more expensive and require a highly trained interviewer.
• Face to face interviews are still dependent on many factors on the day, including the chemistry between the interviewee and the interviewer.

Psychometric testing using gaming technology

Using psychometric methodologies within an immersive, interactive world offers a more cost efficient and insightful way to uncover somebody’s motivations and behaviour traits. Serious games and interactive simulations are ideally suited to uncovering players’ tendencies to act in certain ways or follow particular strategies, which enables a whole range of psychometric personality measurements.

The critical advantage of a gaming environment over an interview or test is it takes you a step towards observed behaviours and motivations, rather than relying on stated behaviours and motivations. Our experience has shown that once players relax in the gaming environment, they let go of their inhibitions and reveal their true motivations and instincts.

PlayGen’s custom made serious games and interactive simulations uncover players’ tendencies to act in certain ways or follow particular strategies. We can help you assess users’ core competencies, identify development needs and target soft skills and hard skills support quicker and more effectively:

• Comparing observed behaviour to core competencies and values to predict organisational fit.
• Comparing observed behaviour with key indicators of performance to predict job performance and identify areas for development.
• Providing clients with detailed feedback on players’ responses and behaviours in specific circumstances. This can inform a far more personalised debrief discussion and can be used to target those players who may benefit from further support in specific areas.