Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The scientific potential of digital game studies in psychology is limited by the observational nature of the data that they investigate. However, digital environments present us with a perfect opportunity to incorporate experimental paradigms in complex interactive and multivariate worlds where each decision made by participants can be tracked and recorded. In this study, we demonstrate an industry-academic research collaboration that offers a proof-of-the-concept on how minor modifications of the game settings could be used to test psychological research questions. We modify the settings of the Zool platform game, where players allocated to the experimental group are provided with more information when in danger of dying in the game. Results of the study show that manipulation does not influence behaviour in the game, such as achieved score or number of deaths, but it changes the overall player's response of whether they will continue playing the game after the disappointing event of losing all their lives, game over event. In line with previous studies, the additional information provided through the experimental manipulation made death in the game more informative to the players.