A Serious Game for Using Socio-Economic and Trust Based Decision-Making Scenarios for Elicitation of Emotional Responses

The relationship between Decision-Making and emotions has been investigated in literature both through theoretical and empirical research. Particularly, some paradigms have been defined, rooted in the Game Theory, that use socio-economic and/or trust based contexts to produce specific emotional responses in people. However, experiments with such game paradigms have most frequently been carried out in controlled settings only. As these methods have a potential usefulness in a variety of areas, we are interested in verifying their applicability “in the wild”. To this end, we have developed a mobile game that integrates in a single plot four of the above mentioned socio-economic and trustbased game paradigms and aims at eliciting specific types and valences of emotions in different interactions. The paper discusses the outcomes of an experiment we carried out with eight participants in order to preliminarily test the usability of our game in authentic contexts of use. The results confirm that the designed game interactions are able to elicit emotional responses in the participants, also in ecological settings, that were expected based on the literature.