Everybody have a different personalities. Some are calm, some are very active, some love attention to details, some enjoy routine, and many more.
In 2020, Dr. Hoshii and the team did a research whether individual's personality will affect how they play their game.
So basically you can fill the survey and pick the statement that suits you really well
Something like "I have big ambition to get all the achievement" or "I enjoy the accompany of the others" or "I'm feeling salty when I see other people are happy" and many more.
And from the result, Dr. Hoshii states that those who enjoy playing story based game often doubting whether if the choices that they have done are the correct thing to do, both in game and reflecting it in real life too.
Some who thrills in hard challenge are the person who will have aggression in their personality for the sake of reaching their achievements
And for those who enjoy puzzle solving games have a tendency in respecting the rules and prefer to have similarities instead of spontaneous change in their daily activity
Those who played a lot of real interactive multiplayer game are often those who needs company to fill their loneliness
If you feel that this description are quite accurate at describing yourself, then my friend you are one of the many victims of "Barnum Effect"
Everything that I have said about the research are made up. Hoshii is my friend and I just want to use this name as the example in this post.
Even the result and the statement are something that I just randomly think of
Any ambiguous statement that can be generalize specifically to you and about you, those kind of thing can make you think that "it is a fact" or "whoa, that is so true"
And thus, you trigger this Barnum effect inside your mind
Now that I got your attention to be more careful and more critical when reading an article / post, I will now share some disclaimer about what you will read here.
In psychology, personality are only one in so many factors that could affect someone's behavior. Even age can affect someone's personality (Srivastava et al., 2003), and who you choose to hangout with can also shape your personality (Atherton et al., 2020). Humans always change because they need to adapt with their surroundings. And to let you know that I'm not making up some statement again, I will cite the studies to the important results or statement so you can also avoid misleading information, preventing confirmation bias and Barnum effect.
Source of all of this content = [ Daryl Talks Games, 2021]
*et al means "and friends", it's a fixed citation format if there're a lot of people doing that research / study paper.
It would be easier for someone to explain about the odds of getting 5 star without losing 50/50 than to describe your own personalities.
Because it's gonna be difficult to break down things that you can't see or touch, only feel.
That's why psychologists developed some approach to measure someone's personality in a form of a personality test.
You might hear about "personality test" a lot already, but it's indeed useful to let us understand ourself more easily.
Lewis Goldberg, one of the psychologist had developed a valid and reliable psychology test called "BIG FIVE personality test"
You might familiar with the word "extrovert" or "introvert"
Yes, it was included in this "BIG FIVE" test
This measure will determine whether you have high / low: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion-Introversion, Agreeableness, and lastly Neuroticism
If you shorten them all together, it will become : OCEAN (yes, this is canon)
You can read this article to dive deeper into BIG FIVE
Openness
|| Talks about those people who have a willingness to try new activities or who are open to unconventional, new ideas.
In a nutshell, high openness result are those who are happy with change, high curiosity love to try new stuff and creative
And those with low openness dislike changes, don't like abstract ideas, and one good example is they rarely change their room's arrangement and dislike changing schedule
Conscientiousness
|| Speaks about paying attention to details, whether you are an organized person or just act on a wimp.
High conscientiousness means that those person might do color coding to organize their list for example
And low conscientiousness means that they just yolo and do stuff freely without paying too much attention to detail*
**traversion
|| How people "recharge" their energy
Extroverted people loves to hangout and join activities to recharge themselves
Introverted people prefers to have internal thoughts inside their mind
Agreeableness
|| Shows whether we are interest in others or not. Are we empathetic and helpful or self serving instead
High agreeableness often consider other's feelings before theirs
Low agreeableness often be viewed as a "competitive" kind of person
Neuroticism
|| Express how emotionally stable you are and how you handle stress
High neuroticism will often express fluctuating mood and feelings
Low neuroticism often show constant mood
I do mention that there is "high" and "low"
But graphically speaking, majority of people's result are average near the middle side instead of the extreme 100 high side or extreme 0 low side
Source = [DG, 2021]
You might be high on openness and agreeableness but you're introverted
*This is just a quick general interpretation
That might means that you're caring to your friends and would give more effort towards them despite being an introvert. And you're not quick to anger when you need to reschedule your beach trip with your close friend, again, just my personal interpretation to give easier example.
Your personality can also affect your game genre preferences too. For example, you feel empathize with the others, hence you love story based game like genshin but you rarely touch grass. As an introvert myself, I don't mind do the self burn because this topic will get more interesting later on.
High conscientiousness means that you love theory crafting or find a good strategy to beat domain or abyss, but the high neuroticism also made you stress up easily in floor 12 abyss. (Hanzo, 2022)
If you're sharp, you can see that I didn't link the citation. Because yes, this is my personal speculation and Hanzo is indeed my friend.
Joking aside, Nick Yee and the team (2015) legit did a study from more than 140,000 gamers about what affect them to play games
You can check this link [Click Me] if you want to participate in the test too and understand more about yourself
It's quite interesting actually
In this table, the study states that players tend to play game based on this 12 combinations.
Maybe you play genshin because you love the "FANTASY", drink osmanthus wine with Zhongli, getting stepped by Xiao, play russian roulette food with Ayato and Thoma
Or on the artistic side, the "DESIGN", you love how the designer loves to add ropes in the character's outfit, you love being a cosplayer
*In some games like the sims or monster hunter, you legit can customize their outfit (for better example)
Or in "STRATEGY - CHALLENGE" combination, you love getting platinum medal in Hyakunin Ikki event
Or you just like Klee, the "DESTRUCTION" one, basically bomb blasting everything that's burnable
Also, it's very rare that people only have 1 in those all 12 combinations, even as a Cosplayer, maybe you are part of "FANTASY - DESIGN - COMMUNITY".
From the data that Nick Yee and the team (2015) had gathered, they then create "Multidimensional Scaling" to map up the clusters of this 12 motivations.
In a simplified explanation, that means that there are some combinations that are relate to each other, but there are also some combination that won't relate to each other
For example, if you look at the bottom right corner (the one tinted in orange color), those who lean towards destruction tends to have excitement as their motivation to play games too, but they have a high chance that they don't do it for the completion sake (the top middle section tinted with blue color)
Yee and the team chunks all these 12 combinations into 3 clusters:
In the bottom-right orange cluster, there’s an Action-Social cluster that combines the interest in fast-paced gameplay with player interaction.
In the left yellow cluster, there’s an Immersion-Creativity cluster that combines the interest in narrative, expression, and world exploration.
In the top blue clusters, there’s a Mastery-Achievement cluster that combines the appeal of strategic gameplay, taking on challenges, and becoming powerful.
You can also see that both Discovery and Power are placed in between the cluster, because if you're assigned with 2 clusters, for example Immersion-Creativity and Mastery-Achievement, you probably enjoy the discovery aspect too.
BUT WAIT...
This post was supposed to be about personalities and not motivation.
Yee and the team in this study only highlight about motivation.
So, why bother mentioning this 12 motivation combinations Sky?
As the matter of fact, turns out there's a study that shows that motivation had a correlation with personalities
And can you guess who did the research?
Yes, it's Yee and the team again
God bless this man
In this article [Click Me], Yee and the team (2015) found that the gaming motivation are consistent towards all the regions (in North America, Western Europe, Southeast Asia, South America, Eastern Europe, Australia + New Zealand)
Meaning that since it's cross culture-proof, this can be a reliable test to measure someone's preferences about game.
The BIG FIVE personality test are also consistent across different cultures, so it can be act as a neutral and objective psych test to measure some research.
Thus, in this article [Click Me], Yee and the team (2016) did a research about the correlation between BIG FIVE personalities and gaming motivation. And the result shows a significant correlation, meaning that there is a connection between personalities and motivation.
Openness are correlated to Fantasy, Story, Design and Discovery
This means that those who are love to explore new things and on the creative sides (the definition of high openness) enjoy expressing the design, dived deep into the story, maybe try to reveal Khaenri'ah's iceberg, interested in "About JUGEMU" in Aether's character info, or perhaps wondering why anemo slime can fly just like Venti's E hold skill, Geo slime had shield just like Zhongli's shield, and there's two electro slime just like Raiden siblings.
Conscientiousness are correlated to Challenge, Strategy, Completion and Power
This means that those who are love to pay attention to details and strategy (which are the definition of high conscientiousness) would love to think the best strategy to beat a challenge like spiral abyss, or now you already have around 700 achievements maybe, or you're Tony To which can one shot primo geovishap using Xingqiu's E skill.
Extraversion are correlated to Destruction, Excitement, Competition and Community
One thing I would like to clarify, people with high extraversion doesn't meant that they must attend parties or keep talking with the others all the time.
In this article [Click here] it states that Extraversion (or extroversion) is characterized by excitability, sociability, talkativeness, assertiveness, and high amounts of emotional expressiveness. People who are high in extraversion are outgoing and tend to gain energy in social situations. Being around other people helps them feel energized and excited.
So, by competing with each others from playing the game online, that feeling of victory or have fun with each others, for those extroverted people it's already enough to help recharge themselves.
If we look at the correlation here, Extraversion people loves destruction, all the chaos, mayhem, explosion, blowing things up, basically Klee's dream world, loves to win in that hide and seek event, love racing game if someone do a custom teapot design, and even just help the hilichurl beating up Reckless Pallad maybe.
But Yee and the team (2016) didn't find the correlation from 2 personalities in BIG FIVE towards gaming motivation.
In their article, they stated this:
The remaining two Big 5 factors are Neuroticism (moody, anxious vs. calm, stable) and Agreeableness (sympathetic, compassionate vs. skeptical, analytical).
We didn’t find clear motivation clusters that mapped to these personality traits. There may be multiple reasons for this:
1. Perhaps some personality traits haven’t been well-articulated as gaming mechanics and motivations in the current gaming market. I.e., they are gaming motivations waiting to be tapped.
2. Alternatively, there isn’t a reason why every personality trait has to have a gaming expression. Perhaps some personality traits don’t make sense as a gaming mechanic or motivation.
3. And finally, perhaps we didn’t cast a wide enough net of motivations to test in our model. For example, see Jason Vandenberghe’s Domains of Play model on his ideas of how these traits may express themselves in a gaming context.
As for the closing, Yee's thoughts have a great perspective about personalities and game.
He said that:
"Games are often stereotyped as escapist fantasies—where people get to pretend to be something they’re not. But what the data shows is that gamers play games that align with their personalities. In the same way that people select the news and media that reinforce their worldviews, gamers select the games that reinforce their identities. For example, gamers who are extraverted prefer more social and action-oriented games. Gamers who are more conscientious prefer games with long-term thinking and planning.
The games we play are a reflection, not an escape, from our own identities. In this sense, people play games not to pretend to be someone they’re not, but to become more of who they really are."
Despite Genshin is only one fraction of how wide the game genre that exists in this world, but in the end, if we can have self control and good management towards ourselves, games can help us understand who we truly are.
I love the way Daryl end his video with this quote:
"There's no right or wrong personality type, nor there is right or wrong game preferences. We all different and seek different things to fulfill us. Above all, I hope that this research encourages you to make a diligent effort to understand your personality, and not try to correct it. It's often said you should "just be yourself", but I know from experience that's not a simple task. I think a better piece of advice would be, "Get to know yourself". Take the time to learn who you are, pay attention to what makes you smile and don't be ashamed of it. Games have always helped me to do that and regardless of how your personality truly affects what you play, I think as long as you're enjoying yourself, it doesn't really matter"
So, how do you feel about your personality now?
I'm Sky, and this is How Your Personality Affects Your Gameplay
If you're interested in knowing your BIG FIVE personality, you can take the test online here [Click Me]
My Guides Archive [Click Me]
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And that's it! I truly hope you love psychology content as much as I do!
My job's done here~
I'm Skyverlash, and I really appreciate all the likes and comment!
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