Using games to understand the mind

Board, card or video games have been played by virtually every individual in the world. Games are popular because they are intuitive and fun. These distinctive qualities of games also make them ideal for studying the mind. By being intuitive, games provide a unique vantage point for understanding the inductive biases that support behaviour in more complex, ecological settings than traditional laboratory experiments. By being fun, games allow researchers to study new questions in cognition such as the meaning of ‘play’ and intrinsic motivation, while also supporting more extensive and diverse data collection by attracting many more participants. We describe the advantages and drawbacks of using games relative to standard laboratory-based experiments and lay out a set of recommendations on how to gain the most from using games to study cognition. We hope this Perspective will lead to a wider use of games as experimental paradigms, elevating the ecological validity, scale and robustness of research on the mind.

Kelsey Allen, Franziska Brändle, Matthew Botvinick, Judith E. Fan, Samuel J. Gershman, Alison Gopnik, Thomas L. Griffiths, Joshua K. Hartshorne, Tobias U. Hauser, Mark K. Ho, Joshua R. de Leeuw, Wei Ji Ma, Kou Murayama, Jonathan D. Nelson, Bas van Opheusden, Thomas Pouncy, Janet Rafner, Iyad Rahwan, Robb B. Rutledge, Jacob Sherson, Özgür Şimşek, Hugo Spiers, Christopher Summerfield, Mirko Thalmann, Natalia Vélez, Andrew J. Watrous, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Eric Schulz