Assessing the Personality Trait Compliance in a Game Context

Serious games for contexts not primarily aimed at entertainment are a well-established phenomenon. Welldesigned serious games captivate players for a specific purpose, and in spite of the often non-entertainment purpose they provide engaging environments. Players are provoked to endeavor in higher-order cognitive skills such as handling of information, decision making and solving problems. Serious games are widely implemented in areas as diverse as healthcare, the military, and persuasive technology or applications aimed at attitude change [1]. There is also the rising trend to use serious games in recruitment contexts, e.g. to acquaint people with certain professional areas and enthuse them, of which America’s Army [2] is a famous example. Using serious games for assessment in a recruitment procedure, is one step further, which is gaining popularity as a screening means next to standard interviews. Playing a game with the goal of assessment is about uncovering personal traits, skills and capabilities (or, of course, deficiencies) that are present in persons. Personality tests have been in use for a long time already e.g. for employee selection, team building or training. They can be paper tests, interviews, or computerized versions of these, but there are a few disadvantages, one of them being the fact that it is sometimes too easy to give socially desirable answers. Furthermore, a self-report questionnaire does not provide information about the players’ decision process. Our idea is that accommodating assessment in a game (although not purely meant to entertain) provides a richer, less repetitive and predictable, and more immersive context. Players might act more natural and intuitive compared to holding a pen and paper, and thus contribute to the validity of the measurement. Serious games can uncover individual personality traits of people in a structural manner, uncolored by the chemistry between interviewer and (future) employee.