Digital games engage the player in complex behavior, which—depending on the game design—can call upon various types of cognitive and emotional processes. As such, games provide an excellent vessel for examining a multitude of concepts central to psychology, from memory encoding, to social skills and decision making. Game-like task setups are classic to experimental psychology: early examples include e.g. Deutsch & Krauss’s Trucking Game (1960) and The Prisoner’s Dilemma (Jones et al. 1968). Contemporary psychological research has also begun to utilize digital games (e.g. Fehr & Gächter 2002; Frey et al. 2007; Slater et al. 2003). In a summary on the use of games in psychological research, Washburn (2003) distinguishes four distinct manners of using digital games in experimental setups: utilizing games as stimulus to study other forms of behavior; involving games to manipulate variables; using games to provide education and instruction; and employing gaming as a performance metric. In addition to psychological studies, games are central stimuli to any research striving to understand games and gaming as a phenomenon, evaluating design decisions, and measuring the effects of playing or the gaming experience itself.
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