A serious game for cognitive disabilities

Nowadays serious games are starting to be accepted not only as entertainment tools, but also as learning tools, used in a school context and in professional training. Regarding people with cognitive disabilities, the few games dedicated to this population are mostly focused on daily life skills, missing the work-related skills. Training adults with cognitive disabilities is still seen as a big challenge for companies, who face a productivity loss when employing such adults, especially while they are being trained. In the present work was developed a serious game for adults with cognitive disabilities, as a tool to teach work-related skills, mitigating the productivity loss. In the game are approached tasks required to an employee working in a supermarket, as this is the most common situation for adults with cognitive disabilities. The developed game was designed according to recent literature in the area of serious games and validated by psychologists, supermarket managers and a supermarket employee. Finally, we run some player testing sessions and used a model of Playability to evaluate the game. From those sessions we can conclude that most people were able to play the developed game although the Player Experience wasn’t maximal. Also, we concluded that for better results regarding serious games for cognitive disabilities there’s still a long way to go, being necessary to define standard concepts and evaluation models to guarantee the adequate Player Experience and suitable learning outcomes.