For dFor decades, personality assessment has often meant sitting down with a long questionnaire and ticking boxes about how you “usually feel” or “tend to behave.”
Questionnaires can be useful, but they also depend on self-perception and self-report. Responses may be influenced by mood, fatigue, social desirability, or the way a person interprets a question.
In our 2022 research, we explored a different approach: a series of 3D escape rooms in which personality could be studied through gameplay.
This work led to the paper “Modelling Core Personality Traits Behaviours in a Gamified Escape Room Environment,” presented at the 16th European Conference on Games Based Learning in Lisbon. The conference took place on October 6–7, 2022, and the paper appears in the proceedings on pages 723–731.proceedings+1
The study became one of the scientific foundations behind MindEscape and the wider SeriousMind vision.
Most contemporary personality research uses the Big Five model, also known as OCEAN:
These traits describe broad patterns in how people think, feel, interact, and behave. Traditionally, they are often measured through self-assessment questionnaires.
Our research proposed using gamification and digital escape rooms to elicit behaviour in structured situations.
Instead of asking only, “Are you organised?”, we can examine how a player plans actions under time pressure.
Instead of asking, “Are you open to new experiences?”, we can observe whether the player explores unfamiliar parts of an environment, even when doing so is not strictly necessary.
The game does not simply ask players to describe themselves. It creates situations in which their choices and actions become observable.
The study designed a series of five 3D escape rooms. Each room focused on behaviours associated with one of the OCEAN traits, while recognising that behaviours can overlap across personality dimensions.
The rooms included different puzzles, events, environmental cues, and narratives intended to elicit particular responses:
The goal was not to create five isolated tests. Players needed to experience all five rooms because a complete personality profile depends on combining metrics across different situations.
Each room was designed as a small behavioural environment.
In the Openness room, players encountered a music-related puzzle and had to explore the environment, identify clues, and experiment with an unfamiliar task. Measures included exploration, time spent searching, and willingness to engage with the environment.
The Conscientiousness room involved preparing a recipe under time pressure. Players had to find ingredients, follow a sequence, solve a jigsaw puzzle, and identify a missing component. The system could examine organisation, persistence, task order, and whether players followed a systematic strategy.
The Extraversion room introduced social situations involving non-player characters. Players had to interact with others, make choices in a social environment, and decide whether to take initiative or wait. The design explored behaviours related to sociability, assertiveness, patience, and public conduct.
The Agreeableness room focused on compromise and cooperation. Players had to negotiate between their own preferences and those of another character, creating opportunities to observe helpfulness, flexibility, competitiveness, and willingness to accommodate others.
The Neuroticism room introduced a stressful event involving a storm, a power cut, and a kitchen fire. Players had to solve problems while dealing with noise, changing lighting, and time pressure. The system examined actions such as walking speed, unnecessary movements, mistakes, and reactions while under stress.papers.academic-conferences
The research connected game actions with measurable behavioural indicators.
Potential metrics included:
These metrics were not interpreted as direct proof of a personality trait. Instead, they formed part of mathematical models designed to connect gameplay patterns with trait-related behaviours.
This distinction matters.
A single action may reflect many factors, including the player’s strategy, previous gaming experience, mood, familiarity with the environment, or understanding of the instructions. Personality assessment therefore requires patterns across multiple tasks and situations.
Physical escape rooms can create rich social experiences, but they are difficult to instrument systematically.
A digital 3D environment makes it possible to record gameplay in greater detail. The system can track movements, interactions, time allocation, puzzle-solving sequences, and responses to events.
This creates a bridge between immersive experience and behavioural analysis.
Digital escape rooms also make it easier to design consistent scenarios. Researchers can repeat the same challenge, vary selected conditions, and compare how different players respond.
The environment becomes both a game and a research instrument.
This research provided an early foundation for MindEscape, SeriousMind’s flagship AI-powered serious game.
MindEscape brings the same central idea into a playable product: personality-related behaviour can be explored through immersive gameplay.
Players enter 3D escape rooms, solve challenges, manage time, interact with the environment, and respond to pressure. AI models analyse behavioural patterns to generate personality-related insights and fit scores.
For individuals, MindEscape can serve as an engaging self-discovery experience. For organisations, it can complement traditional approaches to recruitment, employee development, and vocational guidance.
The product is not intended to replace validated questionnaires, interviews, or professional judgement. It adds another perspective: how people behave while navigating structured challenges.
The paper showed that it is possible to design game mechanics and metrics around behaviours associated with the OCEAN model.
It also identified important limitations.
At the time of the study, the proposed game was not yet available as a full assessment demo. The work provided a theoretical and design foundation, but further research was required to establish reliability, validity, and ground-truth relationships between metrics and personality traits.
The authors also proposed future work involving:
These limitations are not weaknesses to hide. They are part of the normal path from an early research prototype to a validated product.
The central idea remains simple:
Instead of asking only what people say about themselves, we can also examine what they do in carefully designed situations.
A player’s exploration, planning, decision-making, cooperation, persistence, and response to pressure can provide behavioural information that complements self-report.
This is the foundation of SeriousMind’s play-to-reveal approach.
The future of personality assessment will not necessarily require choosing between questionnaires and games. The strongest systems may combine self-report, gameplay, behavioural data, professional interpretation, and transparent communication.
MindEscape is part of that journey—from academic research on gamified escape rooms to AI-powered serious games for personality assessment, HR, education, and human development.
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