BrainHex

Welcome to BrainHex!

BrainHex is the new player satisfaction model by International Hobo, the acclaimed company behind 21st Century Game Design, Game Writing: Narrative Skills for Videogames (with the IGDA Game Writers SIG) and Beyond Game Design: Nine Steps Towards Better Videogames (with some of the leading names in videogames).

This new player model depicts gameplay behaviour in terms of seven key elements in the human nervous systems - the hippocampus and sensory cortices, the amygdala, epinephrine, norepinephrine, the orbito-frontal cortex, the hypothalamus, and the nucleus accumbens. 

The model is the successor to the DGD1 (Demographic Game Design-1) and is based upon the DGD2 research surveys, as well as the latest neurobiological research papers, such as Biederman and Vessel's work tying interest to endomorphins.

You can see the seven different Classes of player, and the corresponding exceptions, by clicking on the relevant links in the sidebar.

The BrainHex Class icons were designed by Zakelro Story Studio based upon an original design by International Hobo and are copyright © 2009 International Hobo Ltd.

Feel free to take a copy of your BrainHex class icon (or dual class icon) and display it anywhere you wish! Simply right click and choosing "save as". All we ask is you provide a link to BrainHex.com anywhere you use our images. 

60,000 Responses!

Today we cleared 60,000 BrainHex tests - thanks to everyone who has contributed to this study so far! The data are being analyzed even as we speak by a team in Canada, and we should have some results to post later this year. Apologies to anyone waiting for a reply to their comment - we don't have a webmaster right now, and so are short staffed.

Fault Fixed

The problem with the survey has now been fixed - thanks to Jonathan Ferguson for bringing this to our attention. And thanks to everyone who has taken the survey so far, which is now some 50,000 people!

Temporary Fault

Apologies to anyone who has tried to take the BrainHex test in recent days: we have a temporary fault caused by our moving of the hosting account. We hope to have this fixed before the end of the week. Thank you for your patience and continued support!

Welcome Facebook!

We're currently experiencing a lot of new visitors coming to us from Facebook... the volume of traffic makes it difficult to stay on top of everything, so please bear with us if you experience any problems.

Many thanks to everyone for completing the survey - your answers will help us better understand how and why people play games. We should be starting the data analysis early in 2011, so watch this space for news about what we learn.