Pirates game

By Ward Dehairs, June 1, 2019

The pirates Digit triplet test is a unity game built to facilitate the classic DTT test for young children. The DTT test consists of 3 digits spoken in a background of noise. The subject has to pick the correct digits. The test repeats while the speech to noise ratio (SNR) is subject to an adaptive procedure. Over time the test converges and yields a measurement of the subject listening ability.

On translating this test to a game a simple story was devised. A pirate crashes on an island and has to retrieve the parts of their ship and their treasure in chests that are scattered across the island. The chests are locked by an unkown combination code. However, the pirate still has a magic conch, that will spell out the numbers, along with the familiar roar when one holds it close to their ear.

This design did incur a big problem; the test is not supposed to show feedback. Because of this, whether or not the chest opens given a certain code is not related to whether the entered code was correct or not. The game merely stretches itself out flexibly, for as long as the adaptive procedure needs to run. This is accomplished by having an indeterminate number of dummy rewards and regular 'treasure' along with the ship parts which are needed to finish the game. Once the procedure wraps up, the player quickly obtains all the parts, after which the ship is repaired and the game ends.

In practice this test does incur much better attention from young users and has been and may continue to be used in active studies.