Designing Experimental Simulations Using Role-Playing Video Games: A Proof-of-Concept Study

Social scientists often study individuals’ experiences that cannot be manipulated experimentally in the real world, such as job loss or socio-economic deprivation. Vignette experiments explore these phenomena by presenting participants with fictional situations. Across vignette formats, however, participants remain recipients of a situation they read, watch, or inhabit. This paper introduces a novel vignette format in which participants act in the situations they encounter: the virtual role-playing vignette (RPV). These RPVs can be embedded into an interactive, graphically rendered environment with a coherent narrative, forming a virtual role-playing simulation (RPS). I show how researchers can build such simulations using a commercial video game engine without any programming and embed them into web-based surveys. I evaluate the RPS approach in a pre-registered experimental test case (N = 184) in which participants took on the role of a citizen of a fictional country and lived through a series of everyday situations revolving around socio-economic deprivation experiences due to unemployment. Participants in the control group experienced comparable events attributed to external causes rather than to their economic situation. The simulation reproduced answer patterns expected from real-world research: treated participants reported lower life satisfaction, lower trust in government, and worse financial prospects, with moderate to substantial effects. Positive affect was also lower in the treatment group. Narrative engagement and need satisfaction did not differ between groups, and effects did not vary with participants' video game experience. Virtual role-playing simulations appear feasible to build with modest resources and capable of producing theoretically coherent experimental data.