Interactive Game with PsychoPy?

Online experiments
1

Hello everyone,

I’m planning to digitalize my experiment, which was initially run on paper.

The experiment involves an economic game between two individuals. There will be several rounds. Participants need to make a decision and type how much they want to consume in each round. Based on their decision there may or may not be another round (depending on whether they use all the resource available).

Is this something doable with PsychoPy? if so, can it be done online as well?

I never used PsychoPy, so I’m a bit lost regarding its potential.

Thank you in advance for the help.

Mario

2

This certainly seems possible but this is a really vague description so it is hard to tell.
Simply building something like a prisoners dilemma in PsychoPy is very straight forward. Getting people to respond with free text responses is much more difficult, but there are a number of good alternatives you could use in the PsychoPy builder such as using a slider to allow subjects to select how much to consume each round.

3

Thanks for your reply and sorry for the vague description. I’m confused because I have never run an experiment online and I wasn’t sure whether you can use PsychoPy for an interactive game. I’m still trying to figure out how to set it up but the game is basically an iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma.

The use of a slider is a good idea.

4

Sorry, by interactive game do you mean actually having two people interacting with each other through the program at the same time? If so I think it is possible (I participated in an experiment like this run through PsychoPy at some point), but it is well outside my PsychoPy ability, and probably not something I would plan on being able to build quickly.
If you just mean having one person interacting with the program that that is very straight forward and with after tackling the learning curve of PsychoPy (and a little help on the forums), would be easy to build.

5

Yes, that is was I meant. Two people playing against each other at the same time. So, the outcome in each round depends on the decision they both make.

I did suspect that is something not very easy to build, that is why I wanted to have an idea on whether it is actually possible before I start looking into it.

6

I’m afraid that sort of interactivity isn’t currently supported but it is on the to-do list

7

Thanks for letting me know Jon, I guess I’ll need to work around it

8

Are there any existing examples of iterated Prisoner’s dilemma games where a single individual can play against the software?

Thanks in advance

9

Hello Mario,

Have you found a way to program this task? If yes, would you mind sharing your solution with us ?
Thanks for replying.