Digital Gaming for Persons With Traumatic Brain Injury

The web-based cognitive training platform CogniFit includes about 33 mini games designed with the purpose of improving the user's cognitive abilities as brain exercises. For the purpose of the research, a selection of CogniFit mini games will be included in the intervention. The mini game tasks will be adapted to players' skills getting more difficult as the players progress. The game tasks are targeting different cognitive abilities such as memory, visual-spatial ability, attention, tracking and fast decision making.

The gameplay will consist of these main elements: 1) the player will be playing the main character of the game, 2) the character will be presented for the player from an isometric perspective, 3) the player will control the character by navigating in partly open-ended 3D environments in which the player must decide a direction and move towards it by avoiding obstacles; 4) the player will engage with real-time action events and act quickly by making strategic and tactical decisions; 5) the player must memorize locations, characters, dialogue and tasks; as well as 6) track, follow or aim at several objects simultaneously. Gaming requires also patience as participants can only make progress in games by trial and error.