Evolution and Digital Game Studies

This paper argues that evolutionary psychology can make a valuable contribution to digital game studies, which have largely been shaped by cultural and humanities-based frameworks such as those of Johan Huizinga and cultural relativist approaches to play. The authors contend that play research has developed along two lineages, one rooted in Karl Groos's functionalist account of play as evolutionary preparation for adult life, and another centered on Huizinga's view of play as a cultural phenomenon. They draw on the Integrated Causal Model proposed by Tooby and Cosmides to critique the Standard Social Science Model, which treats the mind as a blank slate and culture as divorced from biology, and they propose that digital gaming can be productively examined through the lens of evolved cognitive modules.

The central empirical focus concerns judgment under uncertainty, particularly the hot hand phenomenon, in which people perceive clustered patterns in random sequences. Building on experiments by Wilke and Barrett, which were conducted with participants in Germany, at UCLA, and among the Shuar of Ecuador, the authors argue that hot hand responses reflect an adaptive cognitive mechanism suited to clustered resources in ancestral environments rather than a reasoning error. The paper describes a planned extension of this work: a Flash-based game that varies both the natural or artificial character of stimuli and their clustered or dispersed arrangement, with a third axis of image representation (text, 2D vector, 3D rendering, photograph). Data collection was planned across Argentina, Japan, India, and the United States, but the paper reports no results from these experiments, so its contribution is primarily theoretical and proposed rather than empirically demonstrated.