Introducing Mores Research

Mores Research is an early-stage, research-led programme investigating behavioural measurement through gaming. It is the public face of Mores Research's work, and this is the first thing we are publishing under it.

The question we start from is the one on our home page: what can playing games tell us about young minds? We do not know the answer. The point of the company is to find out properly, including the possibility that the answer is no.

The gap we think exists

A parent sees a few hours a day. A school sees a classroom. A clinician sees forty-five minutes a week. Between appointments, almost nothing about a young person's day is observed in a structured, repeatable way. We believe that is a real gap in behavioural information. That belief is a proposition we intend to test, not a finding we are reporting.

The motivation is personal before it is clinical. Our founder's experience of gaming as a space for exploration and escape prompted the original question: could the choices people make in games reveal useful patterns of behaviour? Work at Emora Health raised a related concern about how little is known between consultations. These are founder observations, not established prevalence or efficacy findings.

The research thesis

Repeated, voluntary game sessions may provide measurable observations of how a person approaches challenges. Whether those observations are reliable, whether they relate to behaviour outside the game, and whether they ever improve a care decision are three separate questions. We plan to answer them in that order.

Skill, task design, incentives, interruptions and practice can each explain an action on their own. Gameplay telemetry is behavioural data. It is not a direct neurological recording, and we will not describe it as one.

What we are building

A player explores, builds and meets bounded challenges inside a purpose-built world. The research system records task events and the context around them. Standardised challenges make comparison possible, while optional exploration keeps it a game worth playing. Open-world freedom has to earn its place through evidence rather than being assumed essential.

The twelve-minute session illustrated on our home page is a design example. It is not an established assessment dose.

The path from gaming to useful evidence

1. An interactive world with voluntary, bounded tasks.

2. Recorded events: actions, timing and context.

3. Independent testing of reliability and relevance.

4. Potential use in care, only after usefulness has been tested.

Each step has to be validated before the next one means anything. Nothing about that sequence is a demonstrated pipeline today.

Our first research question

The first construct we will study is persistence after failure. Do retry patterns after an in-game setback relate to persistence assessed independently outside the game? A relationship would justify further study. It would not establish diagnosis, causation or treatment benefit.

We start narrow deliberately: one population, one construct, one comparison.

What the platform would observe

• Time on task. Time spent on a defined challenge, with exits and returns. The interpretation to test, not assume, is attention rather than difficulty, waning interest or interruption.

• Retry after failure. Retry count, latency and strategy changes after a setback. The interpretation to test is persistence rather than practice, incentives or task design.

• Proximity and joint builds. Invitations, proximity and participation in shared builds. The interpretation to test is social preference rather than opportunity and circumstance.

• In-game dialogue. Permitted dialogue choices or transcripts, where a protocol requires them. The interpretation to test is meaning beyond the game, never personality or diagnosis.

An event is not a conclusion. Only the recorded event is a fact; everything after it is a hypothesis.

How we plan to validate it

1. Define and preregister. With a clinician and a measurement researcher, select one age band, one care setting, one task, one primary measure and one comparator. Sample size, analysis, missing-data rules and meaningful success thresholds are fixed before any collection begins.

2. Establish feasibility and reliability. Test voluntary participation, event-logging accuracy and stability across repeated sessions, accounting for gaming experience, accessibility, device, task version and practice. A small pilot is not clinical validation.

3. Test external relevance. Compare game measures against independent clinician ratings, and ask whether the game adds information beyond a brief existing assessment and a simpler task. Evaluate held-out participants, and treat within-person change separately from cross-sectional association.

4. Test usefulness last. Only if the earlier gates pass do we study whether the information helps a defined care decision. Monitoring and therapeutic interventions require separate evaluations.

Trust and safety by design

Participation has to be transparent and age-appropriate. That means child assent alongside appropriate guardian permission, and for adult participants, their own consent and their own control over what is shared. Family access does not mean automatic parental access to a young adult's records.

• Collect only what the protocol needs, with explicit access, retention and withdrawal rules.

• No covert observation, no moral labels, and no pressure to play.

• Dialogue and multiplayer features require additional privacy and safeguarding design before they are included at all.

• Recruitment happens only after the required ethics and site approvals.

Safety procedures and clinical responsibility must be defined before any study is deployed. The game is not a crisis-monitoring service and should never be relied on as one.

What we are not claiming

Nothing we have published establishes clinical usefulness, diagnosis, treatment, crisis detection or improved outcomes. The dashboards and event logs shown on this site are concept illustrations, not participant results. Our first offering is a research program and a proposed platform, not a validated product.

What would change the thesis

We have written down in advance what would make us stop. If the signals turn out to be unreliable, if they add no information beyond simpler measures, if they largely reflect confounders, or if they ask too much of participants, we narrow the program or end it. Negative findings and limitations get published either way. If the only thing we improve is engagement, we will describe an engagement product and not call it a behavioural measure.

The next ninety days

• Days 1 to 30. Interview families, clinicians and the people who would eventually buy this, and secure scientific leadership. The deliverable is one cohort, one first market and one actionable research question.

• Days 31 to 60. Build one task, cost the study, and prepare ethics and privacy materials. The deliverable is a reproducible prototype and a review-ready protocol.

• Days 61 to 90. Seek a written site partnership, submit approvals, and approach funders. The deliverable is a costed study and a milestone-based funding case.

Plenty is still open: the exact age band and indication, study geography, recruitment authority, team commitments, data and intellectual-property rights, study size, and the eventual buyer and regulatory pathway. Recruitment depends on approvals, not on our calendar.

Who we are looking for

Clinical and academic collaborators first. Specifically, a psychometrics or computational-psychiatry researcher, a child and adolescent clinical investigator, and a recruitment site willing to run one small, well-specified study. Alongside them, families who want to follow the work, and research-aligned funders who will ask what evidence would make this worth backing.

If that is you, partner with us or write to hello@moresresearch.com. We would rather be checked than believed.