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Faster than Light

Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products allow researchers to conduct studies using readily accessible systems in order to save time, effort, and/or money that would otherwise be spent designing a custom product. In this article, we discuss the potential of a low-cost and commercially available video game, FTL: Faster Than Light, to be used as a testbed for research into complex or high-workload situations. In this preliminary review, we prototype a performance assessment tool for FTL, which we call FTL Score, and evaluate its ability to distinguish performances between a pilot sample of three participants. The results of this exploratory study showed that our measurement methods were able to distinguish between the performance of two novices and an expert. This suggests that a larger follow-up study is warranted, and lends some support to the hypothesis that FTL can be used as an easy-to-deploy and low-cost testbed for research into high-workload performance.