How Does Conscientiousness Impact on Computer Game Play?
Xiaowen Fang
College of Computing and Digital Media, DePaul University, 243 S. Wabash Avenue, Chicago, IL 60604, U.S.A.
Keywords: Personality, Conscientiousness, Game Play, Gamification, e-Business.
Abstract: With the rise of social media and mobile computing, hedonic components and gamification play a more and
more important role in the success of e-business systems. In addition, as a majority of users of e-business
have game play experiences, understanding their behavior is essential. This research attempts to investigate
user behavior in computer game play and the findings will likely shed lights on how to design gamification
features in e-business systems. Based on a conceptual framework of computer game play proposed by Fang,
Chan, and Nair (2009), an online survey was designed and conducted to investigate the relationship between
personality traits and players’ choice of games. Results suggest that the personality trait, conscientiousness,
has an impact on how players choose games. Findings and their implications were discussed.
1 INTRODUCTION
The popularity of digital (computer and video)
games has reached phenomenal proportions. Based
on the statistics provided by Entertainment Software
Association (2017), 65 % of American households
play computer or video, and their worldwide
markets are expected to grow strongly also in the
future. Computer games have become a major form
of entertainment. In addition, digital games are used
increasingly for therapeutic, educational, and work-
related purposes (Griffiths, 2003; Robillard et al.,
2003). Given the prominence of computer games for
entertainment, researchers need to acquire a better
understanding about computer game players and
their play experience. However, as Bateman and
Boon (2006) stated in the preface of their book, “a
certain mystery still surrounds game design, and
although much has been written on the subject, the
formal study of game design practices in a definite
sense is still in its infancy.”
Based on a conceptual framework of computer
game play proposed by Fang, Chan, and Nair
(2009), this study investigates the relationship
between the personality trait, conscientiousness, and
players’ choice of games. The key research
questions are: 1) what types of people play what
games? And 2) Does the personality trait,
conscientiousness, matter in players’ choice of
games? We expect that findings of these important
questions will no doubt help game developers
improve design of computer games and also improve
their marketing plan. In addition, the findings will
likely shed lights on how to design gamification
features in e-business systems.
2 BACKGROUND LITERATURE
Much of the Psychological Research on Games Has
Been Focusing on Negative Effects of Violent Video
Games Although Some Recent Studies Have
Changed This Tone and Started to Investigate
Individual Differences among Game Players. in This
Section, We First Review Prior Research on
Personality and Computer Game Play. then We
Examine the Big-Five Personality Model and Its
Personality Traits.
2.1 Personality and Computer Game
Play
Previous research has consistently shown that
exposure to violent video games is significantly
linked to increases in aggressive behavior,
aggressive cognition, aggressive affect, and
ardiovascular arousal, and to decreases in helping
behavior (Anderson and Dill, 2000). Anderson and
Dill (2000) also suggest that the positive relationship
between violent video game play and aggressive
behavior and delinquency is stronger for individuals
who are characteristically aggressive and for men.
Furthermore, a few other studies show that
Fang, X.
How Does Conscientiousness Impact on Computer Game Play?.
DOI: 10.5220/0006779701250130
In Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on e-Business and Telecommunications (ICETE 2018) - Volume 1: DCNET, ICE-B, OPTICS, SIGMAP and WINSYS, pages 125-130
ISBN: 978-989-758-319-3
Copyright © 2018 by SCITEPRESS Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reser ved
125
personality is linked to gaming behaviors.
Fetchenhauer and Huang (2004) indicate that the
justice sensitivity could be used to predict decisions
in a number of games using theoretical paradigms
(dictator games, ultimatum games, and a
combination of these two games). Douse and
McManus (1993) suggest that players of a fantasy
Play-By-Mail game were less feminine, less
androgynous, and more introverted than matched
controls. The fantasy game players showed lower
scores on the scale of empathic concern, and were
more likely to describe themselves as “scientific,”
and to include “playing with computers” and
“reading” among their leisure interests than players
in the control group. In a more recent study, Whang
and Chang (2004) explored the lifestyles of online
game players. Based on an online survey, they
classify lifestyles of game players into three groups:
single-oriented players, community-oriented players,
and off-real world players. Players in each group
display distinct differences in their values and game
activities, as well as in their anti-social behavior
tendencies. This study further suggests that
differences in game players’ lifestyles reflect not
only their personality but also their socio-economic
status within the virtual world constructed through
game activities.
Bateman and Boon (2006) applied to Myers-
Briggs Type Indicator (Briggs, 1989) to games and
conducted a survey to investigate game player types.
The survey had two components: a 32-question
Myers-Briggs personality test and a short
questionnaire to determine elements such as game
purchasing and playing habits. About four hundred
participants took part in the study. Based on cluster
analysis results, Bateman and Boon (2006) identified
the following four play styles:
Type 1 Conqueror play involves winning and
beating the game.
Type 2 Manager play revolves around a strategic or
tactical challenges.
Type 3 Wanderer play in which players search for a
fun experience.
Type 4 Participant play.
Within each of these four types, players were further
categorized into two subtypes: hardcore and casual
players.
Bartle (2009) recognizes four types of game
players who play games in the virtual world: 1)
Achievers like acting on the virtual world. Their aim
is usually to succeed in the context of the virtual
world. 2) Explorers like interacting with the virtual
world. They act in order to find out things about the
virtual world and how it works. 3) Socialisers like
interacting with other players. They like talking,
being part of a group, and helping others. 4) Killers
like acting on other players. Sometimes, this is to
gain a big bad reputation, but other times it’s to gain
a big good reputation.
More recently, Fang and Zhao (2009) find: 1)
Sensation seeking has a significant and positive
effect on enjoyment of computer game play through
enhanced engagement during game play for action/
adventure/shooting/fighting, role playing, and
sport/racing games. 2) Sensation seeking has a
significant and positive effect on enjoyment of
computer game play through enhanced cognition
values for family entertainment/simulation games. 3)
Self-forgetfulness has a significant and positive
effect on enjoyment of computer game play through
enhanced engagement during game play for role
playing games.
Despite some of the groundbreaking work in
prior studies, few research has systematically
examined what role player’s personality plays in
choosing games to play. This paper reports the first
attempt to address this research question.
2.2 The Big-five Personality Mode
Personality can be defined as a stable set of
tendencies and characteristics that determine the
commonalities and differences in people’s
psychological behavior (thoughts, feelings and
actions) that have continuity in time. Personality is
one of the most elusive areas of psychology, difficult
to understand, and difficult to test. Nevertheless,
psychologists have developed several theories to
explain personality based on two principles: core of
personality and periphery of personality. Core of
personality addresses the inherent attributes of
human beings which do not change over the course
of living. They are used to explain the similarities
among people. Periphery of personality, on the other
hand, focuses on learned attributes. It helps to
identify the differences among people.
Over the years, the big five-factor personality
model (Digman and Takemoto-Chock, 1981;
McCrae and Costa, 1985; Peabody and Goldberg,
1989; Thurstone, 1934; Tupes and Christal, 1961)
has gained acceptance among researchers because it
establishes a common taxonomy (Goldberg, 1990).
It contains the following five dimensions (or traits)
of personality:
• Extraversion: this factor has been the largest. It
contrasts traits such as talkativeness, liveliness,
and outgoingness versus shyness, quietness, and
passivity.
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126
Agreeableness: the second factor. It contrasts
traits such as kindness and gentleness with
rudeness and harshness.
Conscientiousness: the third factor. It includes
traits such as organization, discipline, and
thoroughness versus sloppiness, laziness, and
unreliability.
Emotional stability (versus neuroticism): the
fourth factor. This factor contains traits such as
relaxedness, versus moodiness, anxiety, and
touchiness.
Intellect or imagination: the fifth factor. It has
traits such as philosophicalness, complexity, and
creativity versus shallowness and
conventionality. This factor also has another
name, openness to experience.
The Big Five model has been researched and
validated by many different psychologists and are at
the core of many personality questionnaires.
According to McCrae and Costa (1985), the
conscientiousness factor can be further refined into
six facets: competence, order, dutifulness,
achievement striving, self-discipline, and
deliberation.
In this study, we applied the big-five personality
model in gaming and focus on the third trait:
conscientiousness.
3 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
Bateman and Boon (2006) identify conqueror play
as one game play style. Players in this play style aim
to win and beat the game.
One of the four player types proposed by Bartle
(2009) is achievers whose aim is usually to succeed
in the context of the virtual world.
Based on media enjoyment theories, personality
theories, and the technology acceptance model, Fang
et al., (2009) propose a conceptual model of
computer game play as depicted in Figure 1.
The prior research on computer game play
strongly suggests that achievement in games is an
important element in the play experience and
personality traits may impact on play experience.
Conscientiousness, as the third personality factor in
the Big-Five personality model, relates to
personality facets: competence, order, dutifulness,
achievement striving, self-discipline, and
deliberation. Therefore, we hypothesize that
conscientiousness will affect players’ choice of
games.
Figure 1: A framework of computer game play (Fang et
al., 2009).
Hypothesis 1: Computer game players will choose
games whose plots and stories are compatible with
players’ conscientiousness trait.
H1a: Computer game players who have a high score
of conscientiousness will likely play a game whose
plots and stories are conventional and orthodox.
H1b: Computer game players who have a low score
of conscientiousness will likely play a game whose
plots and stories are unconventional and unorthodox.
4 METHOD
An online survey was conducted to test the
hypothesis. The survey questionnaire contains three
types of questions: questions about player’s
demographics and gaming experience, questions
about personality traits, and questions about
enjoyment of playing a particular computer game.
Game enjoyment was measured by an 11-item
instrument proposed by Fang et al., (2008).
Personality traits were measured using the 50
item IPIP (Goldberg et al., 2006) inventory available
at http://ipip.ori.org/. Since its inception in 1999,
IPIP has been used in over 60 studies and translated
in over 20 languages.
In the beginning of the survey, a participant was
first asked to answer questions about his/her
demographics and gaming experience such as how
often and how long he/she has played computer
games. Then the participant would answer 50
questions about his/her personality. Upon finishing
the personality questions, the participant was
instructed to choose one or more games that he/she
regularly plays and assess his/her play experience by
answering questions about game enjoyment. If the
How Does Conscientiousness Impact on Computer Game Play?
127
participant chose more than one game, only one
game could be assessed at a time. All the personality
and enjoyment questions were randomized for each
participant to avoid order effect. Participants were
not allowed to skip any questions.
5 RESULTS
5.1 Participants and Descriptive
Statistics
The survey was conducted in four universities in
three different countries: US, Korea, and China. In
total, 1096 computer game players responded to the
survey. Table 1 presents the descriptive statistics of
participants’ demographic information.
Table 1: Demographic Information of Participants.
Variables
Gender
Male (%) 85.2
Female (%) 14.8
Culture
American (%) 85.6
Korean (%) 10.3
Chinese (%) 4.1
Age
Mean 25.7
Std. 6.99
How long have you been
playing computer/video
games?
Mean (years) 14.8
Std. 8.94
How many hours on average
do you play?
Mean 2.81
Std. 2.126
How often do you play
computer/video games?
Daily (%) 41.3
Weekly (%) 40.7
Monthly (%) 9.0
Seldom (%) 9.0
5.2 Validation of Survey Instrument
A factor analysis was conducted to establish the
discriminant and construct validity. Only items
highly loaded (loadings > 0.5) on one of the
following constructs were retained in the analysis:
extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness,
emotional stability, intellect, affect, behavior, and
cognition. The first five constructs are the big-five
personality factors and the last three are the factors
of game enjoyment.
Reliability analysis was performed. Cronbach’s
Alpha values were calculated to check the internal
consistency of the items. Table 2 shows Cronbach’s
alpha values of all eight constructs. All of these
alpha values were above 0.7 and satisfactory.
Table 2: Cronbach’s Alpha Values.
Construc
t
Cronbach’s Alpha
Extraversion 0.893
Agreeableness 0.788
Conscientiousness 0.779
Emotional Stability 0.876
Intellect 0.786
Affec
t
0.731
Behavio
r
0.823
Cognition 0.730
Therefore, the survey instrument was valid and
reliable.
5.3 Pair-wise Comparison Analysis
In order to detect personality differences among
players of different games, pair-wise comparisons of
conscientiousness scores among different game titles
were performed. The following procedure was used
in this analysis: 1) All responses were grouped by
game titles. Different editions of the same game title
were assigned the same title with the assumption
that these different editions should have the similar
characteristics and can be categorized as the same
kind of game. For example, “Call of Duty”, “Call of
Duty 2”, and “Call of Duty 3” were assigned the
same title “CallofDuty”. 2) Game titles that were
assessed by at least 10 different game players were
selected for this analysis. 3) Pair-wise comparisons
of conscientiousness scores were performed among
all game titles with at least 10 responses. Table 3
presents the pair-wise comparison results.
Table 3 clearly shows that players of different
game titles have different conscientiousness scores.
It indicates that the personality trait,
conscientiousness, may actually affect players’
choice of games. To understand the true differences
among different game titles, the two games falling in
the two opposite clusters 1 and 3 respectively,
“LegendofZeldaTwilight” and “SimCity”, were
compared.
In the cluster 1, “The Legend of Zelda: Twilight
Princess” is is an action-adventure game developed
by Nintendo Entertainment Analysis and
Development. The story focuses on series
protagonist Link, who tries to prevent Hyrule from
being engulfed by a corrupted parallel dimension
known as the Twilight Realm. To do so, he takes the
forms of both a human and a wolf, and is assisted by
a mysterious creature named Midna. This game
involves fantasy violence and animated blood. As
shown in Table 3, players of this game title had
lower conscientiousness scores than those of other
game titles. Therefore, hypothesis H1b is supported.
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128
“Sim City” is a city-building simulation game.
The objective of the game is to design and build a
city. There is no doubt that its objective is more
conventional and orthodox than “The Legend of
Zelda: Twilight Princess”. Players of this game had
higher conscientiousness scores than those of other
games. Therefore, hypothesis H1a is also supported.
A correlation analysis reveals that no significant
correlations were found between the
conscientiousness scores and scores of enjoyment-
related constructs: affect, behavior, and cognition.
The correlation analysis suggests that the differences
presented in Table 3 were not related or confound to
enjoyment of game players.
Table 3: Pair-wise Comparisons of Conscientiousness
Scores Among Different Game Titles.
Genre N Subset
1 1 2 3
LegendofZeldaTwili
gh
t
20 2.842857
WarcraftIII 44 3.214286 3.214286
ElderScrollsIVObliv
ion
29 3.221675 3.221675
Quake 14 3.255102 3.255102
NeedforSpeed 33 3.264069 3.264069
WorldofWarcraft 97 3.269514 3.269514
Battlefield 28 3.290816 3.290816
SuperMario 34 3.298319 3.298319
Sims 23 3.304348 3.304348
Fallout 20 3.307143 3.307143
SidMeiersCivilizatio
n
15 3.323810
StarCraft 62 3.327189
HalfLife 41 3.344948
GuitarHero 24 3.351190
ResidentEvil 22 3.370130 3.370130
CounterStrike 30 3.385714 3.385714
SuperSmashBros 29 3.389163 3.389163
LegoStarWars 14 3.397959 3.397959
Diablo 44 3.405844 3.405844
FIFA 40 3.417857 3.417857
AssasinsCreed 40 3.432143 3.432143
Bioshock 23 3.447205 3.447205
Halo 66 3.456710 3.456710
FinalFantasy 28 3.464286 3.464286
Civilization 14 3.479592 3.479592
Crysis 11 3.519481 3.519481
MarioKart 15 3.533333 3.533333
Doom 23 3.552795 3.552795
GrandTheftAuto 54 3.558201 3.558201
MaddenNFL 38 3.601504 3.601504
DevilMayCry 22 3.603896 3.603896
Rainbow 13 3.604396 3.604396
CommandandConqu
e
r
25 3.605714 3.605714
CallofDuty
11
5
3.658385 3.658385
Note: The score was out of 5 (maximal score) and p value <
0.05
6 CONCLUSIONS
The online survey we conducted presents
compelling evidence that the personality trait,
conscientiousness, impacts on game players’ choice
of game. The implications of this finding to
developers of computer games are profound. By
changing the design of plots and stories in a game, a
game designer can turn it to serve a completely
different audience. On the other hand, the plots and
stories can also be used to guide marketing efforts.
However, the findings from this study are far
from conclusive due to some limitations: 1) the
participants might not be representative although we
tried very hard to draw players from different
geographic regions and different institutions. 2) The
measurement of personality might not be sufficiently
accurate since we only measured the high-level big-
five personality factors but not the finer personality
facets within each big-five factor. 3) The sample size
was still relatively small in terms of number of
assessed game titles and number of responses for
each game title.
As future steps, we will continue to: 1) refine the
personality instrument to measure finer personality
traits, and 2) collect more data to build a larger and
more representative sample.
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