In Your Face(t) Impact of Personality and Context on Gameplay Behavior

Video games are now acknowledged as a prominent part of popular culture and played by an audience wider and more varied than ever before. Considerable recent research shows that people engage with games differently, and these variations may be attributable to individual differences. Understanding the impact of personality on behavior in games has several benefits: more inclusive design practices, accurate user models for adaptive applications and articulated toolsets to segment players for game user research. Nonetheless the work done so far to explore the interplay between personality and behavior in virtual environments does not always account for personality at a granular level, nor does it take into consideration the different contexts of the environment beyond pooling variables together. We hypothesize, first, that by considering the individual facets that compose broad personality traits we will be able to identify stronger links between them and gameplay behavior. Second, we expect that dividing the game environment into its component areas with different situational affordances will also improve correlations, as behavior modulation by personality is highly context-dependent. Using the FiveFactor personality model as an interpretive framework, we confirmed that the correlations between traits and behaviors were specific to game areas that carry different situational affordances, and were enhanced by inclusion of the facets. In the future, a verified database of game behavior correlations could have predictive value for inferring personality attitudes. This will help carve the way to more inclusive design, and the development of better adaptive strategies for games beyond what is currently in practice.