Millisecond Forums

Tetris in Inquisit Web

https://forums.millisecond.com/Topic29624.aspx

By Gene - 8/26/2020

Hi,

Sorry if this has been asked before but I was wondering the best approach to having  Tetris game in an Inquisit Web experiment.
Would it be possible to build a fully functional Tetris game be able to be coded with the ability to record participant key presses, user responses etc. in Inquisit? 

Thank you!
By Dave - 8/27/2020

GeneLee - 8/27/2020
Hi,

Sorry if this has been asked before but I was wondering the best approach to having  Tetris game in an Inquisit Web experiment.
Would it be possible to build a fully functional Tetris game be able to be coded with the ability to record participant key presses, user responses etc. in Inquisit? 

Thank you!

It would perhaps be possible to build in Inquisit, but it would be very difficult and tedious. To be honest, I do not think there is a good way to do this at all.
By Gene - 8/28/2020

Ok thank you for that Dave! Would you know if there are other options would there be to run a Tetris game in an online experiment?

We are trying to use it as a task to get participants into a 'flow state' (the mental state in which a person performing some activity is fully immersed in an activity - Tetris has been shown to get people into this state). Preferably, we'd like to be able to record a measure of participant key presses, user responses made by the participant during the task as output data.
We had the idea of embedding a Tetris game inside Inquisit (e.g. Flash or HTML) but that won't allow us to access the output data (but correct me if I'm wrong with that). However, it is still an option if need be.

Would you have any advice on how to achieve something like this?

Thanks for your advice, it's much appreciated.
By Dave - 8/31/2020

GeneLee - 8/29/2020
Ok thank you for that Dave! Would you know if there are other options would there be to run a Tetris game in an online experiment?

We are trying to use it as a task to get participants into a 'flow state' (the mental state in which a person performing some activity is fully immersed in an activity - Tetris has been shown to get people into this state). Preferably, we'd like to be able to record a measure of participant key presses, user responses made by the participant during the task as output data.
We had the idea of embedding a Tetris game inside Inquisit (e.g. Flash or HTML) but that won't allow us to access the output data (but correct me if I'm wrong with that). However, it is still an option if need be.

Would you have any advice on how to achieve something like this?

Thanks for your advice, it's much appreciated.

Embedding Flash or HTML is something you can try, however, as you already noted, Inquisit won't be able to access any key press data in that scenario. Depending on the exact (Flash or HTML) implementation, things also might not really work or not work well across all platforms -- there are limits to interactive content that can be embedded which differ somewhat across platforms. I'd avoid Flash entirely, and as for HTML, it would basically come down to trying out various implementations that are floating around and checking which one(s) work best.

I'll keep pondering this and if I can think of anything else (e.g. a way to implement this natively in Inquisit that isn't a total, only half-functional mess), I'll add it to this thread.