More than 47.5 million people are currently living with dementia worldwide. That’s more than the population of Spain? This number is estimated to increase to 135 million by 2050.
Saatchi & Saatchi London and Deutsche Telekom are trying to help science solve its riddles. With a game called Sea Hero Quest that anyone can play.
For many people living with dementia, one of the first effects they experience is a loss of spatial awareness. They lose the ability to navigate their way through even well-known places and environments. If science can create a global benchmark for how we navigate, science will take one big step closer to developing new diagnostic tests for the diseases that cause dementia. That’s what Sea Hero Quest aims to do.
The multi-platform mobile game is designed to increase science’s understanding of spatial navigation. Every aspect of Sea Hero Quest has been designed jointly by game developers and scientists to provide insights about the way that people navigate every day. As players make their way through mazes of islands and icebergs, every second of gameplay will be translated into scientific data and stored anonymously and securely within a T-Systems data centre in Germany.
All data collected from the game will be made freely available to scientists worldwide and will also be used by UCL: one of the World’s leading dementia research faculties, to develop new diagnostic tests for dementia. Playing Sea Hero Quest for just 2 minutes equates to 5 hours of similar, lab-based research which means that if 100,000 people play for 2 minutes each the game can generate the equivalent of more than 50 years of similar, lab-based research. This will result in the world’s largest crowd sourced database benchmarking a key aspect of brain function affected by dementia.
For those playing, it’s an adventure game in which players take on the role of a sea explorer’s son traversing the seas, looking for and collecting the lost pieces of their father’s ocean journal. On their journey, players need to find and photograph weird and wonderful sea creatures. The game is available worldwide and free of charge from the App Store and Google Play.
An animated film, directed by Bibo Bergeron, will support the game by revealing its backstory of an ageing Sea Explorer who slowly loses his memories of past sea voyages to dementia. This story is revealed in the film through pages of his beloved journal being lost, so the viewer understands the disintegration of the old man’s memory.
The game is part of Deutsche Telekom’s Life is for sharing ethos. Behind the idea is the power of Deutsche Telekom’s network and its 200 million users but the agency also hopes to snare some of the 3 billion hours spent playing online and mobile games weekly worldwide to reach the widest audience possible.
“We are proving that great things do happen when people start to share,” stated Jason Romeyko, global chief creative officer, Saatchi & Saatchi Switzerland and Deutsche Telekom global chief creative officer.
Hans-Christian Schwingen, chief brand officer at Deutsche Telekom noted, “Deutsche Telekom believes in the power of sharing. We knew that there must be a way of empowering everyone to share their time to help to move us one step closer to a breakthrough in the field of dementia. At the same time, we realised that if we wanted achieve real scale and truly make a difference, we needed to make it fun for everyone involved. We needed to create something that would get people gaming for good.”
Key partners on the Deutsche Telekom Sea Hero Quest project include the charity, Alzheimer’s Research UK; University College London; The University of East Anglia and game developers Glitchers.
Every aspect of Sea Hero Quest has been designed jointly by game developers and scientists to provide insights about the way that people navigate every day. As players make their way through mazes of islands and icebergs, from the shores of the Kano Reef to the High Seas, every second of gameplay will be translated into scientific data and stored anonymously and securely within a T-Systems data centre in Germany. This will result in the world’s largest crowd sourced database benchmarking human spatial cognition, a key aspect of brain function affected by dementia.
Hilary Evans, chief executive, at Alzheimer’s Research UK, commented, “We have never seen anything undertaken in dementia research at this scale before. The data set that Deutsche Telekom’s Sea Hero Quest generates is truly unprecedented, until now these kind of investigations took years to coordinate and at best gave us a snap shot of how a very small sample of volunteers behaved. The largest spatial navigation study to date comprised less than 600 volunteers. Providing the research community with access to an open source data set of this nature, at this scale, in such a short period of time is exactly the kind of innovation required to unlock the next breakthrough in dementia research.”
Credits:
Advertising Agency: Saatchi & Saatchi, London
Executive Creative Directors: Jason Romeyko, Andy Jex & Rob Potts
Creative directors & writers: Franki Goodwin & Will John
Planners: Jimmy Elston & Charlie Brenninkmeijer
Account Handlers: Clare Shaw, Sam Grischotti, Marta Jales & Matilda Jones.
Project Manager: Amie Mills
Producer: Laszlo Bederna
Media Buying Agency: Mediacom
Media Planners: Kari Jackson-Kloenther, Evan Depko
Production Company: Buf (Paris)
Director: Bibo Bergeron
Producers: Sophie Raia & Coline Six
Post-Production Company: Unit Media
Audio Post-Production Company: Grand Central Studios
Game Credits:
Game Project Lead: Amie Mills
Executive Creative Director: Jason Romeyko
Creative Directors: Franki Goodwin & Will John
Developer – Game Design: Andy Barnard
Creative Director – Game Design: Matt Hyde
Technical Director – Game Design: Hugo Scott Slade
Game Design Director: Max Scott-Slade
Sound Design: Tim Garrett
Creature Design. 3d Modelling & Texturing: Zhivko Terziivanov
Landscape Artwork: Tristan Ménard
Ui Design: Patrick Schofield
