Interactive Games as State-Revealing Systems: Why Continuous Play Exposes Psychological Transitions Without Questionnaires

This working paper proposes a methodological reframing of interactive games as state-revealing systems rather than entertainment artifacts or assessment wrappers. It argues that continuous decision-making environments can expose psychological and cognitive state transitions through observable interaction traces, without relying on self-report questionnaires or explicit introspection tasks. The paper positions games as low-resistance observation interfaces, where hesitation, path revision, persistence, and abandonment function as measurable indicators of underlying state dynamics. The contribution is conceptual and methodological, providing a foundation for subsequent papers on narrative media, multimodal symbolic systems, and dynamic state modeling.