Video games have become a central part of contemporary popular culture. However, little research exists on the utilization of interactive video games for answering questions relevant for social scientists. This paper explores how video games can be designed and used for collecting behavioral data of participants in experimentally manipulated settings. Using RPG Maker, a commercial tool for creating video games, I designed a game in which participants control a character, talk to non-player characters, spend money, and make abstract decisions (e.g., voting). As a substantive test case, this paper answers the question how the trade-off between taxation and the quality of public services affect peoples' political solidarity. The video game was embedded in an online survey. Participants (N = 300, random sample of the German population) played as citizens of a fictional state, conducted everyday activities and thereby consumed various private and public goods. Within their fictional stay, they experienced changing levels of taxation and public service quality, resulting in more/less resources available for consuming private goods in exchange for a worse/better access to public services. Participants could then vote for a trade-off between taxes and public spending. Substantively, the preliminary results suggest a thermostatic mechanism, where people adjust their political solidarity according to their consumption quality of public and private goods. Methodologically, this study shows that using video games for data collections can generate high-quality behavioral data by making participants motivated, attentive, emotionally engaged, and giving them a strong agency.