Simulating scenarios for research on culture & cognition using a commercial role-play game

Most research on culture and cognition uses self-report tasks such as paper and pencil questionnaires. Such tasks are inexpensive, quick, and easy to score, but they are vulnerable to response bias and manipulation effects. Action-based or performance tasks can be more absorbing and permit more of someone's natural behavior to emerge but are rarer due to increased costs, lower experimenter control, and difficult logistics. Computer games can potentially regain the benefits of real performance and immersive play while retaining experimenter control and keeping costs low. Properly constructed, computer games can simulate action-demanding scenarios which embed opportunities for personality and culturally-conditioned behaviors to manifest themselves. This is especially true when computer-simulated non-player characters are included which exhibit carefully modeled behaviors. However, such simulations are not themselves panaceas. This paper examines some of the concepts we have tried, the challenges we have faced, and the lessons we have learned.