Jones, 1984, Video Games as Psychological Tests

Jones, Marshall B. 1984. “Video Games as Psychological Tests”. Simulation and Games. 15 (2): 131-57.

The concern of this article, as the title suggests, is with the use of video games as psychological tests. First, the author suggests five features that distinguish commercial video games (which he means console games) from earlier “computer-based” games: 1. Video games are not educational (excepting a rare few); 2. The reinforcements for playing the games well and learning to play them better are internal, and these reinforcements are strong; 3. Games are fast, which accounts for some of their novelty; 4. The rules are not presented in the form of instructions, but written into the game program; 5. Most video games do not model familiar physical systems, instead they create their own world with its own laws of motion.

Video games, Jones writes, lend themselves well to psychological testing because they are robust, inexpensive, small, light, and portable. Scoring is objective, and the rules of the game are similar for every player (135). They are problematic because the programs are inaccessible, and it takes time for the tests to stabilize (stabilization here is taken to mean when the player no longer shows a tendency to improve with practice, 140). Even a good game “generally requires 20-30 minutes of playing time before individual differences in performance become acceptably reliable” (136). In any case, video game tests lend themselves to individualization.

Stabilization produces a learning curve, however it is only descriptive. Different individuals follow different courses (such as starting out with high or low performances), but Jones hypothesizes that the pace of improvement eventually becomes uniform with practice. The significance is that until stabilization occurs, individual performances on different trials do not represent the same test (139). The issue lies in when to determine when stabilization takes place (140).

Do video games have predictive power in determining performance? This evidence is “still skimpy” (142). The two research findings that showed encouraging findings were based on Air Combat Maneuvering (ACM) and job simulation. These were highly specific to the task, however. For example, ACM showed that video games may have predictive power in pilot performance.

In other ways, video games could be useful testing tools: assessing cognitive function at high altitudes (or other extreme conditions), differences between individual performances, or retention of hand-eye coordinated skills. In conclusion, Jones believes in a promising future of video game tests in applied psychology. They allow psychologists to pursue individual differences and experimental manipulations in a technical context, easily and objectively (155).