Gamer in the scanner: Event-related analysis of fMRI activity during retro videogame play guided by automated annotations of game content

In recent years, videogames have gathered interest in cognitive neuroscience for their potential to study cognition in dynamical and naturalistic contexts. Yet, the complexity of game environments often challenges traditional modeling approaches, and current annotation methods—typically manual or based on modified games—remain labor-intensive and limited in scope. Here, we introduce a flexible and scalable framework using the gym-retro Python library to emulate a classic action-platformer, Shinobi III: Return of the Ninja Master, and automatically annotate gameplay events directly from the game’s memory states. This setup enables the identification of both player actions (e.g., jumping, hitting) and feedback events (e.g., killing an enemy, being hit), without modifying the game. Four individuals played the videogame for a combined total of 32 h (>7 h each) while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Resulting activation maps revealed distributed engagement of visual, motor, executive, and limbic systems, consistent with the cognitive demands of gameplay. Within-participant reproducibility of brain responses across sessions was robust across event types (r ≈ .25–.55), with some consistency observed even for rarer events like HealthLoss. Between-participant correlations were notably lower, reflecting participant-specific neural signatures. Multivoxel pattern analysis showed that brain responses to different in-game events were highly discriminable, with classification accuracy typically around or above 90%, though occasionally dropping to ~40% for less frequent events. These findings demonstrate that automated emulator-based annotations enable robust, interpretable, and scalable mapping of naturalistic cognitive processes using commercial videogames.