Real-World Geopolitical Influences on In-Game Financial Behaviour

This study examines whether real-world geopolitical framing alters financial decision-making within a pandemic trading simulation game. Its central thesis is that players who represent real countries behave differently from those who represent fictitious ones, with country names functioning as an active influence on in-game trading. The research compares a control condition using fictitious country names against a test condition using real country names, drawing on turn-by-turn trade logs, quadratic curve fitting to classify players into trade-maximising and resource-conserving archetypes, leaderboard comparisons, and qualitative review of gameplay footage.

The most substantive evidence comes from a study of 30 Indian undergraduate participants. Among 20 players whose data could be analysed, 75 percent followed an upward parabolic trading trajectory, and peaks in trading activity were delayed under the real-country condition. The authors attribute this to heightened immersion and perceived factual differences between nations. Players also displayed an implicit in-group bias favouring India, alongside anecdotal instances of trades that appeared diplomatically motivated rather than economically rational, and a notable mismatch between players' perceived and actual leaderboard standings.

The study's scope is narrow: a single nationality, a COVID-era context, and small samples of roughly thirty participants with only six game runs in the earlier experiment. The authors acknowledge that these constraints limit generalisability, and that the game's granularity makes balance difficult to achieve. The findings are therefore best read as suggestive of framing effects in simulated economic environments rather than as established population-level conclusions. The accompanying bibliography situates the work within research on news polarisation, virtual economies, online social wellbeing, and the politicisation of international affairs.