PsyOps: Personality assessment through gaming behavior

Traditional personality assessment methods are based on behavioral, observational, and self-report measures [8], each of which suffers from weaknesses that stem from ambiguity (behavioral measures), cost-payoff ratio (professional observation), and reliability (self-report). Assessment through video game play offers a way of quantifying behavior, automating observations, and side-stepping self-report. To determine whether video games are a valuable addition to the arsenal of personality assessment methods, we set out to answer the question: Does the statistically trackable play style of a player significantly correlate to his personality? To find the answer, we conducted a survey among Battlefield 3 players. Through the use of a promotional campaign, dubbed ’PsyOps’, the response to the survey ran up to 13,376 individuals. Each participant was asked to fill out a 100-item IPIP (International Personality Item Pool) Big Five personality questionnaire, and requested for permission to draw their game statistics from a public database. All in all, 175 game variables, 100 personality scores, and 5 personality dimensions were correlated for the total sample, and 11 demographic subsamples. We found that play style and personality do correlate significantly, showing three key themes. (1) Conscientiousness is negatively correlated with speed of action. (2) The game variable Unlock Score per Second correlates most often and most strongly with personality, especially with Conscientiousness and Extraversion. (3) Work ethic correlates negatively with performance in the game. Apart from these three themes, subsamples differ in correlational patterns. An additional result was found when performing a posthoc analysis on age. Correlations between age and play style were greater than those between play style and personality. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. FDG 2013 Chania, Krete Greece Copyright 20XX ACM X-XXXXX-XX-X/XX/XX ...$15.00. While themes (1), (2) and (3) showed effect sizes up to the 0.2 range, age offered effect sizes in the 0.3 range for game performance and game length preference, as well as a correlation of r = 0.42 with Unlock Score per Second. Age and personality correlate with a similar effect size as play style and personality. Therefore, age correlates strongly to play style, while age and play style offer complimentary correlations to personality.