Modifying a Game to Study the Impact of an Hostile Environments on Foraging Behavior

Video games and game-like experiment tasks are increasingly used to study human behavior. Prior work used such video games to study foraging behavior, including stressors such as hostile entities (i.e. predators). For this study we adapted a 3D video game to assess its potential for studying the impact of hostile environments on human foraging behavior. Two versions of the game were created that varied in terms of hostility, with the hostile condition including predatory non-player characters (NPCs). This pilot aimed to assess the suitability of the modified game for inducing and evaluating stress-related foraging patterns and pinpoint needed modifications for a large-scale study. Participants (n = 18) reported higher levels of stress in the hostile compared to the non-hostile environment. Results of the pilot indicate that modifications are needed to induce more pronounced behavioral effects, as the currently used measures of exploration (e.g., distance traveled; number of gathered items) were not affected by the hostility manipulation. We aim to further develop the game to improve effectiveness of the hostility manipulation and to investigate the effects with more elaborate exploration analyses (e.g., including measures of entropy).