Sea Hero Quest

Background

What business exactly are telecoms companies in? Connecting people is too glib. Deutsche Telekom believes it's in the sharing business and that memories and the people we share them with are what really matter in life.

Dementia is the single biggest threat to this belief. It is the next global health crisis, currently affecting 47.5 million people worldwide.

However, despite the size of the problem, for every six research scientists looking into cancer there is only one researching dementia. It's a little-understood disease, in desperate need of a radical change in thinking.

Idea

The insight was that around the world people spend on average 3 billion hours a week playing games, increasingly on mobile platforms.

Could a mobile game be the natural solution to the problem? The ambition was simple yet revolutionary: to seamlessly integrate science and gaming, so that helping researchers fight dementia became something addictive and entertaining.

Sea Hero Quest is a mobile game that tests and records the navigational skills that dementia sufferers often lose first.

In getting people around the world to play the game, the plan was to create a human benchmark for spatial navigation, against which dementia could be measured in the future. Simply by playing, gamers were providing valuable research data.

The game tells the story of a son trying to save his father's memories – essentially a metaphor for what people are doing by playing this game.

Results

In less than five days following global launch, primarily driven by PR, the game was downloaded over 500,000 times and picked up by over 250 media outlets worldwide.

An influencer partnership with PewDiePie achieved 3.2 million views in 24 hours.

After playing a combined total of 58 months, players generated the equivalent of 725 years of similar, lab-based research, a rate of 150 times faster. The largest previous study into dementia reached only 599 participants.

Our Thoughts

High ambition is sometimes the precursor to hubris. But you can't tackle huge global problems like dementia without it, and here thinking big – and maybe laterally too -- really pays off.

The big thinking was to go global to collect as much data as possible.

After all, dementia is not defined by geography or socio-demographic status.

The lateral thinking was to go mobile.

If people spend on average some 3 billion hours per week playing games – increasingly on mobile platforms – then that's a straightforward way to get dementia sufferers to volunteer their information and time – and hence their data.

Once you've got that far, a global mobile phone operator like Deutsche Telekom probably suggests itself as the ideal partner for such a project.

But it still takes huge ambition and focus to bring an idea like this to life, and then to design and get a game like Sea Hero Quest out to the market.

Plaudits all round.