How the balloon game works
You see a balloon and two buttons. Each press of Pump inflates it a little and adds a small amount of money to a temporary bank for that balloon. Press Collect and the money is banked and a new balloon appears. If the balloon pops before you collect, the money on that balloon disappears. MIT Technology Review’s reporter, playing it in 2021, earned five virtual cents a pump.
The design comes from the Balloon Analogue Risk Task, or BART. Pymetrics’ 2017 US patent names the BART as the task behind its Balloons game and describes its research version as lasting about 80 balloons, with the number of pumps as the measure of risk-taking. Pymetrics does not publish how many balloons the live game uses.
What it measures
The patent notes that BART performance correlates with other risk measures, including the Barratt Impulsivity Scale and the Sensation Seeking Scale, and that higher BART scores go with a higher propensity for risky behaviour even after controlling for age, gender, impulsivity and sensation seeking. Pymetrics reported test-retest reliability of .65 to .88 for its version, depending on the level of risk.
Writing in Psychology Today, William Poundstone describes the game as a measure of attitudes to risk. Harver, which has since acquired Pymetrics, lists risk tolerance among the traits its game-based assessment covers.
How your play is read
There is no target number of pumps. Pymetrics says its games have no right or wrong answers, and a 2021 audit of its system, written by Northeastern University researchers with Pymetrics staff, explains why. Each employer’s model is trained on the gameplay of a group of its high-performing employees, typically 50 to 100 people, against a comparison group drawn from Pymetrics’ wider database. Candidates are then placed in tiers: Highly Recommended from about the 70th percentile up, Recommended between the 50th and 70th, and Not Recommended below.
So the same pattern of pumping can suit one role and not another. Pymetrics’ own advice is to play as yourself: "The more you are yourself, the more helpful your results will be."
How our practice version works
Our Balloon practice runs 39 balloons at 5 cents a pump, with Pump and Cash Out buttons and no clock. In our version a balloon’s shape hints at how long it will last, so there is a pattern to learn over the run. That pattern is ours, and so is the balloon count: Pymetrics publishes neither its burst rule nor its number of balloons. Our version shows your running total and ends with a breakdown of your risk-taking and how it changed, which the real game does not give you.