Social-Behavioral Modeling for Complex Systems

17 Online Games for Studying Human Behavior

Kiran Lakkaraju¹, Laura Epifanovskaya², Mallory Stites¹, Josh Letchford², Jason Reinhardt² and Jon Whetzel¹

¹ Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, NM, 87185, USA

² Sandia National Laboratories, California, Livermore, CA, 94551, USA

Introduction

Games and simulations have been used as experimental platforms for centuries, particularly in the form of war games used for planning purposes and for reenactment of historical battles (Sabin 2014). In these instances, they are used as a type of virtual laboratory to test hypotheses about what will happen (or in the case of historical battles, what might have happened) when a given decision is made under a certain set of conditions. Such games can be highly simplistic or exquisitely detailed; they can be board, card, or Internet games; or they can be highly choreographed simulations, sometimes involving multiple (in many cases high‐level) personnel from military and government. While the use of games as a didactic and exploratory tool is widespread, they are used less frequently to gather data on player actions for subsequent statistical meta‐analysis. Some reasons for this are the small size (in statistical terms) of the participating groups, the differences in the games and simulations themselves from game to game, and the difficulty in acquiring and storing analyzable data in real time.

Online games offer the potential to address some of these difficulties. Online games ...