Any work being done on Perception, Action, and/or Cognition in Video games? Call it a nerd crossover, but I've always been curious about how we play games on a mechanistic level. However, even coming from a rational viewpoint video games seem like a fruitful domain of study, since data collection is simple and complete, environmental variables can be easily manipulated, and the task is far richer than typically used in cognitive psychology experiments.

So, have any psychological theories been formed by/applied to in this domain? It seems like eye-tracking and cognitive modeling approaches are both particularly well suited to this domain, but any work in cognitive science on the phenomena involved here would be interesting to see.

The only things I've found are the interesting experimental work on semantic actions in Tetris, and some modeling work done on unreal tournament within the ACT-R community. It should be noted however, that the latter example uses a video game environment as decent simulation of reality and thus models an agent inside the game, whilst the former focuses on the game from the player's point of view. This might be a personal bias, but the latter seems much more fruitful and more in line with the spirit of my question.
The Cognitive Neuroscience of Video Games (C. S. Green, D. Bavelier, 2004) is a good if somewhat dated overview of cognitive research on video game players. They note that ordinary video game users show a number of differentiated and improved mental skills:


  Video game play has been shown to dramatically
  enhance visuo-motor skills.  In particular, video game players have been shown to
  possess decreased reaction times, increased hand-eye coordination and augmented
  manual dexterity.  Video game play has also been shown to improve spatial skills such as
  mental rotation, spatial visualization and the ability to mentally work in threedimensions.  In addition, video game play has been shown to enhance numerous aspects
  of visual attention including the ability to divide and switch attention, the temporal and
  spatial resolution of visual attention, and the number of objects that can be attended.


BrainHex: Preliminary Results from a Neurobiological Gamer Typology Survey is a study that mapped personality types to "gamer archetypes":


  The model presents seven different archetypes of players: Seeker, Survivor, Daredevil, Mastermind, Conqueror, Socialiser, and Achiever. We explain how each of these player archetypes relates to older player typologies (such as Myers-Briggs), and how each archetype characterizes a specific playing style. We conducted a survey among more than 50,000 players using the BrainHex model as a personality type motivator to gather and compare demographic data to the different BrainHex archetypes. We discuss some results from this survey with a focus on psychometric orientation of respondents, to establish relationships between personality types and BrainHex archetypes.


Their archetypes present an interesting insight into personality types as mapped to certain kinds of gamers.