Paper: "Control Your Game-Self: . .. . "

Paper: "Control Your Game-Self: Effects of Controller Type on Enjoyment, Motivation, and Personality in Game"

"To investigate the relationship between player experience (PX) of a game and a player's in-game personality (how they felt about themselves), we chose to compare the effects of different game controllers.
.... controller choice affects a player's enjoyment and motivation of a game, but also affects a player's perception of themselves during play as measured by their in-game personality."

"Whether they are made to entertain you, or to educate you, good video games engage you. Significant research has tried to understand engagement in games by measuring player experience (PX) ... Our study shows that there are a number of effects of controller on PX and in-game player personality.
....

we designed and implemented a custom game that allowed us to compare three controller types (Microsoft Kinect, PlayStation Move, and Xbox GamePad).
we show how controller choice affects a player's perception of themselves and how their perceived personality (using the five factor model) within the game (game-self) compares to their idealized version of themselves (ideal-self) and their reality (actual-self).
We designed a simple 3D game where the premise was that the user was flying inside of a tornado in a ship and the goal was to collect spinning items. .... The experiment was conducted with 78 students from the University of Saskatchewan, Canada (38 female, mean age=25.8, SD=6.6).
The player's trait personality was assessed using the Big Five Inventory (BFI). ...  . Participants completed the BFI five times. At the beginning of the experiment, participants were asked to reflect on their actual-self and rated their agreement with 44 statements of the form .... Participants also reflected on their ideal-self, by completing items of the form "The type of person you wish, desire, or hope to be…", with the same items as used for assessing actual-self. .. After each game condition, participants were asked to assess their game-self using a short form (15 questions). .... Items in the short version covered all 5 aspects of personality, the number of items representing the scales E, A, O, N, C per questionnaire were stable, and we fully counterbalanced the presentation.
..........
The use of personality theory in general – and the five factors in particular – have been useful for understanding play in several contexts. For example, the five factors of personality have been shown to correspond with a player’s preferred genre and motivation to play. In the area of player taxonomies, research has shown that player type can be predicted from the personality traits of the player, and that considering personality traits in combination with player taxonomies and game design elements can inform the understanding of enjoyment in game play. Additionally, research has shown that personality traits carry into general behavior in virtual worlds .........
... research on character choice in World of Warcraft has shown that players create characters closer to their ideal-selves than to their actual-selves, and that this trend was stronger for those with higher depression scores.

Figure 5 shows the differences in perceived personality in game for the different controllers in the context of perceived actual-self and ideal-self. Interestingly, the in-game personalities are contained within the boundaries of actual-self. Contrary to expectations of game play, the game did not produce more idealized versions of players, but moved their perceived personality further from their ideal than their actual-self (with the exception of neuroticism)."

That paper was presented at CHI 2013, April 27–May 2, 2013, Paris, France.