A Data-Driven Design of AR Alternate Reality Games to Measure Resilience

Games have been used to study psychological phenomena in the past. Further, Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) have also been discussed as great platforms to study psychological constructs such as team dynamics, social communication or coordination, personality, and emotions. In this paper, we introduce a new ARG we developed called LUX. LUX is developed as a new team-based Alternate Reality Game used to study the construct of coping and resilience within small groups of undergraduate/graduate students. We used a design research approach to develop LUX, where we developed and tested prototypes based on their ability to: (a) engage participants over time, and (b) collect granular data to study coping and resilience. To assess these prototypes, we developed a novel methodology that combines three methods: (i) qualitative coding of participants’ interaction outlining team work, exhibition of emotions, solution development, and submissions, (ii) process discovery, where a model of how participants interacted and solved process is developed from log data, (iii) a process visualization highlighting problem solving and team work with bottlenecks and time sinks, and (iv) a method to identify coping from process visualizations. We present LUX, the methodology, and results from using this methodology to evaluate one of the playtests.