Choose Your Own Adventure: A Tutorial for Using Narrative Games to Study Social Cognitive Processes

Narrative games can immerse participants in a psychologically rich world and deeply engage them when their decisions impact the progression of the storyline. Games can be a useful alternative for psychologists who more typically use vignettes to study socioemotional processes. The tutorial begins with advice on how to develop a game concept that permits the measurement of your variables of interest. Next, the tutorial provides step-by-step instructions to program a game and analyze game responses. The tutorial includes specific recommendations of free software (e.g., Twine, fast-dm) for programming, art creation, and data analyses to bolster the accessibility of game design for investigating socioemotional processes. Tips on how to maintain experimental control alongside custom personalization of the game are also included. The tutorial concludes with a brief illustration of how computational modeling such as Drift Diffusion Modeling can be applied to game responses.