In the midst of a myriad digital revolutions over the past few decades, video games are perhaps one of the most prolific technologies to come out of it. 

As new cutting edge technologies in graphics and hardware unroll, so do video games. According to Truelist, 3.26 billion people, or 41% of the world population, are estimated to have played video games. This number is projected to jump to 3.8bn in the next three years. 

Largely, the video game industry is focussed on one mission above all others: to entertain the user. Video game users often use them as a break from reality, or to connect with likeminded people in a way that is inaccessible in their real life. 

“I see entertainment as just one of the problems that we could solve with games,” said Maxwell Scott-Slade, co-founder and director of GLITCHERS. His video game studio, founded a decade ago in 2013, leverages video games to confront complex topics spanning from mental health to finances. 

Working hand in hand with scientists and researchers, he tries to “trojan horse” educational or research into genuinely fun games. “It’s engineering a situation where anyone can get involved in difficult things through just playing.”

The outcome of this is advantageous for researchers, who get access to swathes of user data from the gamers; it’s also beneficial to the gamers, who come away from the gaming experience with new worldviews and potentially life-saving information. 

Games for Dementia Research

The most well-known game by GLITCHERS – so far – is Sea Hero Quest. That game was built in partnership with dementia researchers, who were looking for new ways to identify early onset dementia. 

What they noticed, in collaboration with scientists, was that degradation in spatial navigation skills was one of the first signs of dementia. “At the time there was no healthy benchmark, so they just didn’t know what healthy looked like,” said Scott-Slade. 

Sea Hero Quest then launched and quickly reached 100,000 users within 10 hours of launch, eventually reaching a benchmark of 4.5 million users, 50% of which answered questions regarding gender, age, and lifestyle habits. 

Scott-Slade says since the game launched in 2016, the studio is now at the stage where they are close to working out how to use the game as a diagnostics tool. “To potentially check your spatial ability against a worldwide benchmark,” said Scott-Slade, “we can probably change the course of a lot of people’s lives.”

Breaking Expectations

Despite his worries being typecast as a dementia game studio, Scott-Slade held true to the mission statement of GLITCHERS which was ‘games for good,’ which encompasses far more than dementia research alone. 

After a decade in business, Scott-Slade says “It’s only really now that people are really engaged in the idea of games going beyond their kind of scope.” 

One of which was a financial planning app, based on banking data. To do this, GLITCHERS teamed up with the fintech Thought Machine. 

“They were like ‘if you’ve got someone’s live transactional data, what kind of game would you make about that?’ And so I was obsessed with the idea of trying to empathise with a player who doesn’t have money. Empathise with the player who wants to change their spending habits, but doesn’t know how.”

From that, GLITCHERS built the game Nestlings, which uses transactional data that uses creatures to represent spending habits, and as a non-number focussed representation of your bank health. 

The user has the ability to adopt creatures that represent different spending habits on an island, where the characters worshiped a ‘nest egg’ that represented a savings goal.

This is one of many issues GLITCHERS has addressed through games for good. The next, for instance,  is a game coming out soon which addresses the issue of biodiversity and forest regeneration, by playing as a photographer observing wildlife in forests. 

By using data from a camera network in Gabon, West Africa, Scott-Slade hopes to show the world that forest regeneration and biodiversity should be rooted in the mantra of leaving the forest to regenerate on its own, and be the a passive observer, rather than actively trying to plant trees which could have undesired effects in the long term. 

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Scotland as a Home

“Scotland is a place you can breathe,” remarked Scott-Slade when asked why he chose Edinburgh to run GLITCHERS from. “We were able to grow a very talented team, we’re able to take our time.

“I’ve spent 14 years in London and I think that the chase of trying to get that next bit of work to justify your means has often meant we haven’t been able to choose the work that necessarily 100% aligns to our vision as a company,” he continued, referring to his time spent as a video game developer in London. 

“I know what burnout looks like,” he said. “Scotland for us is a great place to have the talent to have the space, but without the the latent stress that exist in London.”

For Scott-Slade, Scotland presented the perfect spot to have a team that prioritised mental health of its workers, along with having access to a deep talent pool from many of the Scottish universities.