Gamifying psychological assessment: insights from gamifying the thematic apperception test

Gamification and serious games have the capacity to increase engagement in often non-engaging contexts such as a test. In this study, we gamified a psychological test, the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), with the player motivation concepts of achievement, exploration, and social interactions. We used the platform Study-Crafter to implement our games and ran a study to test the effectiveness of this gamified psychological assessment. All participants completed both the standard version of the TAT and our gamified versions and rated their experience in each setting through self-reports. Our results show that the gamified versions of the TAT provided a more enjoyable and motivating experience than the standard version. We conclude that gamifying psychological tests has potential for increasing motivation in psychological assessments while questions of validity remain to be addressed.