How Your Personality Affects What You Play

Turns out this video was actually pretty easy  to write. In 2016, Dr Jeremiah Appleton and his team ran a study where they would have gamers  fill out surveys regarding their personality. They would agree or disagree with statements like  “I have a colorful imagination when I am alone”, “I enjoy the company of others”, “I worry I am not  accomplishing enough” or “I feel the need to win, even if it hurts someone else's feelings”  etc.

etc. . All statements you can feel free to answer quietly to yourself if you like.

Dr  Appleton then had the subjects report what video game genres they enjoyed the most. And in most  cases subjects that typically enjoyed JRPGs, had more quiet reserved personalities and often  had serious doubts as to whether they had made the right decision or done the right thing… in  games and in life. Those that typically enjoyed platformers and more fast paced games like Doom  often had a strong tendency to be critical of themselves, fans of puzzle games like tetris or  hue prefer a certain amount of change and variety in their everyday lives and become dissatisfied  when governed by restrictions and limitations.

The same goes for fans of minecraft and other  open world sandbox games, who also specifically had personalities that lend themselves  to a great need for other people to like and admire them. And if you’re finding these  statements feel accurate of your own gaming preferences and personality… quit that,  because every word of what I just said… was made up. Including that first line,  this video was a royal bitch to make.

How does our personality affect what games we  prefer playing? It’s a damn good question and one that has been investigated by people much  smarter than me. But before we dive into this, I’d like to make a couple disclaimers and a couple  examples… out of you.

I didn’t set that whole opening thing up just to screw with you, although  I didn’t necessarily not enjoy doing that, I did it to point out that personality psych is. . . 

a slippery slope. If you happened to really find yourself believing what I said about personalities  there, you fell victim to the barnum effect, which is how psychics and horoscope writers stay  in business. Ambiguous statements that can be true of pretty much anyone, when presented specifically  to you about you, can very easily begin to feel true.

Pair that with a little bit of confirmation  bias, and suddenly everything we talk about today may lead you to believe that you are an incredibly  creative person just because you put more hours into Persona 5 than your entire undergrad degree.  I’m not judging, that’s a self burn, but I just want you to be aware. Watch your footing on  this video and take it with a grain of salt.

Alright enough disclaimers, let’s dive into the  tremendously fascinating world of personality. . .

One more thing tho, sorry, uh, you should know  that personality… is not the most rock solid field in psych. There are measures developed to  try and capture our personalities, but between the changing of age the changing of culture around us,  who we are is ever shifting. Also most of it tends to be correlational.

So what we’re talking about  today is tendencies and a snapshot of what we think we know, not laws. So again, grain of salt.  .

. . and its intersection with game preference.

If I asked you to give me a breakdown  of your favorite types of games to play, you’d probably start by telling me some  genres, you might even rattle off some titles. Ah you put a lot of time into Ghostrunner,  maybe you get cheap thrills in fast paced titles like that and Mirror’s Edge. Oh, you and  your friends are STILL playing animal crossing, I respect it.

You might enjoy the sensation of  dunking on your friends or maybe your dreams are just a little too peaceful and you like to go out  of your way to ruin that whole thing. Maybe you’d tell me you like getting absorbed in a story  like something seen in Xenoblade or Tsushima, maybe your pants get tighter when you shave  off a few seconds of your Portal speedrun or when you finally unlock that last support  for Dorothea, ah a fellow fan of the opera I see. Nomatter your personal syllabus  of titles or ways to play said titles, we can measure genre preference, but if I asked  you to give me a breakdown of your personality, you’d probably talk in more circles than your  buddy trying to get you to invest in dogecoin.

It’s hard to… get a true read on personality, but  psychologists have come up with a few methods. And the one we’ll be using today is the Big 5  Personality Traits developed by Lewis Goldberg. The big 5 traits are sort of the most accepted,  replicable, and used measure in the world of psych today, and each trait essentially works on  a sliding scale with most people falling somewhere in the middle.

. . Generally personalities don’t sit  at the extremes, just closer to one end.

Remember, we’re ever changing. We’ll dive more deeply  into each individual trait as we get to some of the bigger points of the video, but just as an  example. .

. Openness, to wildly oversimplify it, refers to our willingness and desire to seek  out/think about new things. People with high openness tend to be very creative, enjoy trying  new things, are extremely curious, and are happy with change.

Those with low openness despise  change, you won’t catch them rearranging their room or changing their schedule much, they  don’t like new, and don't like abstract ideas. Conscientiousness sotra deals with how organized  one is, do you pay attention to detail and strategize or act on a whim? Agreeableness  refers to our interest in others, are we empathetic and helpful or are we self serving  and oblivious to others?

Neuroticism deals with emotional stability and how you handle stress, and  I think you’re already familiar with Extraversion. At our core, we all land somewhere on each  of these 5 scales. Maybe you’re pretty low on the extraversion scale, but you are highly  Agreeable so you really empathize with people therefore you might enjoy a good emotional story  but don’t much care for participating in real world human interaction.

As an introvert, I can  relate to you. Maybe you’re highly conscientious so you love games where you plan ahead and  strategize, but due to your high neuroticism, you often get stressed when you have to make  a tough decision. .

. maybe you over prepare for that mission or get choice paralysis when  trying to decide on an outfit or a skill. This is all my speculation by the way, I’m  just trying to give you an idea of how your personality might affect how you approach titles. 

Luckily though, we don’t have to speculate, there has been some remarkable work done  here by one Dr Nick Yee of Quantic Foundry. In 2015 Yee and his team gathered data from  over 140,000 gamers using their homegrown gamer motivation profile, which you can still take now  if you like and I recommend you do at some point, it’s really eye opening and fun. Link in the  description, pop in it a new tab and take it after you finish this.

From this data, they found  that gamers typically play due to a combination of any of these 12 motivations. You might play to  stretch your creative muscles, you might play to get wrapped up in a story or to feel like you’re  someone else. Some folks do it for the challenge, some do it for the power trip, many of you crave  the community and the competition, and some of us just like to blow shit up.

Likely tho, we  are all some combination of any of these; people are rarely so one dimensional. And  since most folks exhibit multiple of these motivations when playing games, Yee and  his colleagues used a little technique called Multidimensional Scaling for the data which  maps out the correlation between these variables… if two motivations are more correlated, they are  put closer together, whereas motivations that are less correlated are placed farther apart… meaning  since these two dots are close to each other, if you are really into gaming for destruction,  you are likely also into it for excitement, but less likely to be into it for strategy… When  you take a look at the full map from the data, you can get a better idea of what motivations are  related…. Aaaad you might see that you probably fall into one of these 3 clusters or maybe even  dip your toes into 2 of them.

. . which is exactly what Yee and his team noticed.

There were 3 higher  level structures, 3 primary types of players that most motivation correlations fall under:  Action-Social - which combines the love of fast-paced gameplay with player interaction,  Immersion-Creativity - which combines the interest in stories, player expression, and exploration,  and Mastery-Achievement which mixes the appeal of strategic gameplay, tough challenges, and chasing  achievement. The discovery and power motivations are tricky. .

. they don’t really fit in just one  cluster, and according to Yee they sort of act as bridges between the 3 major groups. Meaning if  you identify with the Immersion-Creativity cluster and the Mastery-Achievement cluster,  discovery likely really appeals to you.

Now keep in mind, this is simply… motivations  we’re talking about, not how personality affects them. But what’s fascinating is that  much like the big 5 personality traits, the gamer motivations mapping is  consistent across several different regions and cultures. Which could suggest that  gaming motivations and personality are both in some ways universal for all of  us and furthermore could be related in some sort of consistent manner.

As I was reading up  on this and writing the script for this video, I realized that all there was left to do was  find proof of that relationship. And as I embarked on this noble quest into the sweaty  migraine inducing DMV that is google scholar to try and find research that could connect  the two, I was surprised to find that Dr Yee had already broken ground on that research  making my job a lot easier. God bless this man.

Only a few weeks later, the folks at Quantic  gathered data from the gamers who filled out their gamer motivation profile AND a big  5 personality test. They then analyzed the correlations between the participants’ offline  personality traits and their gaming motivations… pretty much what I mentioned in the beginning of  this video, but this time I’m not juicing your kiwis Connor, they actually did this and  did it correctly. And what they found was statistically significant correlations, meaningful  connections that based on the sample size, did not happen by chance.

They stumbled upon  the invisible strings that connect who we are to the experiences we love. The Action Social  cluster, which contains the high motivations of excitement, competition, and community were  largely connected to high levels of extraversion. Now extraversion is usually characterized by  most folks as being outgoing or being good around others, but research supports that it’s  more accurately characterized by excitability, emotional expressiveness, cravings of excitement,  and gaining energy in social situations… not necessarily by being “good” in them, but  gaining something from it.

Even if it’s simply competition or attention. Consider this, you don’t  have to like people to be an extrovert. .

. and yet you may still gain something from being around  them. So you may very well choose to pick up fighting games because your extraversion makes you  crave the competition just as well as you may play action adventures for the constant excitement  or mmos and social sims because you do actually like the people in your life and get something  meaningful from kind interaction with others.

Another correlation they found was between  Openness and the Immersion-Creativity cluster. RPGs, Sandboxes, Open worlds, anything with a deep  immersive story or a way to express creativity… Most players that enjoyed these games tended  to have high levels of openness which like we discussed earlier is characterized by imagination  and creativity. Folks high in this tend to have a broad range of interests, enjoy change,  and are open to new and varied experiences.

Which may explain why these people can finish  JRPGs even after weird interactions like. . .

. I joke, but this 100% me, I’m here for the  story and I don’t care how weird things get. I’d be willing to bet the undertale fanbase is  full of high openness people because again, that trait is all about painting outside the lines. 

Which is probably why it also correlates highly to the enjoyment of sandboxes like minecraft and  games with hefty customization like monster hunter world. Conscientiousness was slightly mapped  to the mastery-achievement cluster, which. .

. makes sense. HIghly conscientious folks are  preparers, strategizers, task oriented schedule followers that likely find challenging  strategy games like advance wars and Xcom to be just the right scritch to their itch.

The  correlation here wasn't as strong as the others, but it may shine a little light on the type of  people that enjoy finding all of the achievements. Again, that highly conscientious detail and  task oriented nature probably lends itself to finding some pleasure in unlocking all the  achievements and getting all of the collectibles. Okay… I’m gonna come up for air now, that was  a lot of big words.

Couple things to note. The correlations here are significant and they  are insightful, but they aren’t exactly. .

. high meaning that this only gives us a glimpse  of what is usually the case but certainly not universal truths. After all, you may be the most  detail oriented conscientious person on earth and yet hate playing strategy games because your  personality ruins them.

Maybe they just come off as a chore and you have too many of those in  real life so you’d rather unwind with something relaxing (gris). Like I said earlier, phat grain  of salt, if episode one and psychology studies have taught me anything, it’s that there is always  a bigger fish and there is always an exception. But I do think there is a lot of truth in  these correlations.

After all if you’re super introverted, you likely would like  playing alone. If you are high in openness, the stranger and more novel a world is, the  more likely you are to really want to sink your teeth into it. Which by the way, this  kinda supports my theory of why when a new game trailer drops you may find yourself  going ehhh, not for me whereas your buddy gets hype and just tosses it on their mountain  of a backlog because they want to play it all.

High openness is great and all, but if everything  new is appealing, RIP to your buddys wallet and free time. Or maybe you’re the buddy, I’m the  buddy, my backlog is bigger than my future. For what it’s worth, my take on  how who we are affects what we play has to do with personality reinforcement. 

We seek out not just games but media in general that reflects our personality. Like Yee  mentioned in his closing statements of this study, games are often stereotyped as escapist fantasies  so that we can be who we’re not… but we may in fact play them to better experience who we truly  are, how we actually tick, and better understand our own identities. A few studies gathered in a  meta analysis by NCBI reveal that our music and television consumption is for often purposes  of identity development, emotion regulation, and companionship, especially in younger people. 

Which leads me to believe that in a lot of ways, gaming may influence our personality in the same  way personality affects our gaming. Personality may in fact be the original spark that triggers  our interest, but I think over time they act upon each other back and forth. Games may serve as a  mirror that reveals what we do and don’t enjoy which especially in our earlier years might  structure who we are.

Personality often runs into the nature vs nurture debate which….  Is almost always both when it comes to most psychology topics. Genetics certainly plays a  part in personality, as has been shown in studies with twins.

In fact based on this study, genetic  influence on the big 5 traits were all estimated to be around 50% which means that personality is  likely half formed by our genes and half by our experiences. So the reason you keep coming back  to fighting games may be because you are highly extraverted, but it may also be because your  first gaming experience as a kid was melee. It may not be as black and white as your personality  affecting what you play, it may go both ways.

A couple stray thoughts before we pull this video  out of the oven, age is also a huge factor. Some research presented in 2003 suggests that as we  age, our personality shifts. Conscientiousness and agreeableness tends to go up through your 20s  and openness tends to decline.

Meaning for a lot of people, you may really find yourself narrowing  the genres you play, maybe not everything new will be quite as appealing. Which I think kind of  reflects the whole notion of identity management and formation in your early years. Though I could  just be seeing what I want to see with that.

There are also other models of gaming motivations than  Yee’s you might want to consider. Bartle's Player Types for example, plots you as one of 4 different  player types depending on if you tend to be more interested in the world vs other players and  acting upon those things or interacting with them. Jason Vandenberghe’s Domains of Play model  may also be worth checking out.

Ultimately, it is extremely difficult to pin down just what exactly  the relationship between our personalities and our game preferences is. It could be something we  just can’t quite grasp yet and the research I’ve gathered for you today only reveals the tip of  the iceberg. But then again, it could all be white noise, grasping at the wind, small tendencies  that reveal more about what we think is true than what is actually the case.

But what it most  certainly is, is delicious food for thought. If you take away anything from this video, know that  there is no right or wrong personality type just like there is no right or wrong game preference.  We’re all different and all seek what fulfills 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 such 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 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. Howdy partner, thank you so much for watching  today.

You could have watched any video in the world, but you’re here with me, and I  appreciate that. I hope you got something of value out of this and hey if you want more  videos on personality like how it might affect your in game decision making or how quickly  you find yourself getting tilted, let me know by liking the video, sharing it with a friend,  or subscribing if you haven't done so already. And if you’d like to pick that next topic, then  you should join my dear friends over on Patreon who made this video possible and voted for this  topic.

Shoutout to this month’s featured Patron… Lukas Kalbertodt, Daniel King, Gingy, Amro,  MonikerEpsilon, Ruth-Anne French, Ganchroi, and Karlan Cruz. If you’d like to pick a  future topic, be a future featured patron, or simply have your name appear in the ending  scroll, click that orange link. Much love my friends, go take Dr Yee’s survey, and until  next time, have yourself a damn good one.