I love applied games and I’m also a sucker for personality analysis, so I was excited to try the free game. In Scoutible, players have mysteriously landed on a desert island, which is probably my favorite type of game…. Monkey Island, Sims: Castaway, MyTribe, Stranded Without A Phone, even Next Island (I’ve spent a fairly significant chunk of time pretending to be stuck on a deserted island). I had really high hopes for Scoutible, I was already imagining a Ready Player One future, where we’d all unlock insights into our personalities and career skills through playing a survival game.
The game is in beta, but even accounting for that, there’s very little gameplay so far. There’s a female avatar, while not particularly aspirational or attractive, she gets full marks for wearing a shirt and pants.
One of the skills assessed is the candidate’s emotional intelligence or interpersonal skills, but the obvious problem to me is that picking the “correct” dialogue option in an game isn’t at all the same skill as dealing with clients and coworkers’ emotional states. Noting the differences between humans and NPCs is a major part of applied emotional intelligence.
When I was interacting with Scoutible’s few NPCs, I was given the sort of black-and-white options we always try to avoid in game development. One NPC failed to do what the boss NPC asked him for — do you scold him, or do the task yourself? Then do you complain about his laziness or make excuses for him? I was disappointed by the lack of nuance in any interpersonal interactions. These felt like generic job interview questions with a thin veneer of gameplay over it.
(via “Scoutible,” a Game That Hopes To Replace Job Interviews (Sort Of) | (The) Absolute)
