Prêt-à-Jouer: commercial videogames as ready-made human perception labs.

Abstract

Cognitive science has long relied on carefully controlled laboratory paradigms to study perception, attention, and executive functioning, raising persistent questions about ecological validity when scenes are complex, demands are self-paced, and outcomes matter to the observer. Commercial videogames present exactly this kind of environment. They are cognitively demanding by design, motivating by nature and consistent enough across players to support systematic behavioral comparison. Unlike the tools of typical laboratory research, they already exist. Here, we encourage researchers to treat commercial games as ready-made testing grounds requiring only a minimal experimental toolkit of screen recording, eye tracking, and behavioral timing. We describe how researchers can select games, generate testable perceptual hypotheses directly from a game's affordances, and implement within-subjects designs, with no engine access or developer cooperation required. We close by distinguishing the ecological questions this approach can answer from the mechanistic ones it cannot.