Mindful Escape: a Mobile Serious Game to Predict the Personality Trait Cooperation

Personality plays a crucial role in predicting preferences, behaviors, and interactions. Its importance in accurately characterizing individuals has led to its application in areas such as movies, music, and tourism. Although personality questionnaires have traditionally been used to measure personality, they are prone to biases, such as inflated or false responses. In response to these limitations, serious games emerge as innovative alternatives for assessing personality, studying the player's behavior. This study developed and evaluated Mindful Escape, a short duration mobile serious game, as a concept proof to implicitly measure the personality trait of cooperation. The game adapts concepts from the Prisoner's Dilemma and the Tragedy of the Commons to create an Escape Room environment to encourage both cooperative and competitive interactions. Experiments with real users were performed (\(n\)=78), where significant correlations between the game's metrics and cooperation were identified. Additionally, other traits such as modesty, morality, altruism, and anger, also showed correlations. The game's duration exceeded the planned 5min, averaging ca. 10min, mainly due to difficulties related to gameplay by less experienced users, which needs to be addressed in the future. Nevertheless, the participants’ feedback was highly positive, highlighting the immersive and engaging experience offered by the game. The results show short-duration mobile games offer a viable and unobtrusive method for assessing users' detailed personality traits, paving the way to replace traditional personality questionnaires, and their integration into personality-based systems.