Personality and Behavior in Role-based Online Games

Abstract

Both offline and online human behaviors are affected by personality. Of special interests are online games, where players have to impersonate specific roles and their behaviors are extensively tracked by the game. In this paper, we propose to study the relationship between players' personality and game behavior in League of Legends (LoL), one of the most popular Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) games. We use linear mixed effects (LME) models to describe relationships between players' personality traits (measured by the Five Factor Model) and two major aspects of the game: the impersonated roles and in-game actions. On the one hand, we study relationships within the game environment by modeling role attributes from match behaviors and vice versa. On the other hand, we analyze the relationship between a player's five personality traits and their game behavior by showing significant correlations between each personality trait and the set of corresponding behaviors. Our findings suggest that personality and behavior are highly entangled and provide a new perspective to understand how personality can affect behavior in role-based online games.

Why iPlay: The Relationships of Autistic and Schizotypal Traits With Patterns of Video Game Use

“…Current evidence suggests that video game usage patterns are consistent with psychological profiles and behaviors that mirror real life motivations and preferences (Wang et al, 2019;Delhove and Greitemeyer, 2020). For example, self-perceived ingame aggression in the First Person Shooter game Overwatch is positively associated with trait aggression, Dark Tetrad traits, and negatively with empathy and agreeableness in players (Delhove and Greitemeyer, 2020).…”

“…For example, self-perceived in-game aggression in the First Person Shooter game Overwatch is positively associated with trait aggression, Dark Tetrad traits, and negatively with empathy and agreeableness in players ( Delhove and Greitemeyer, 2020 ). Multiple lines of evidence also suggest Big Five personality traits have a measurable impact in individual patterns of video game usage ( Tabacchi et al, 2017 ; Wang et al, 2019 ; Yang et al, 2020 ). For example, extraversion has been positively associated with preference for party, music, and casual games, and negatively with fantasy role-playing, MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role playing games), action role-playing, and strategy games ( Peever et al, 2012 ).…”

Predicting Risk Propensity Through Player Behavior in DOTA 2: A Cross-Sectional Study

“…For massively multiplayer online role-playing games, several studies have collected players' in-game behaviors through selfreported questionnaires and searchable databases, investigating the association between different dimensions of personality models with behavioral cues (Yee et al, 2011a;Worth and Book, 2014;Wang and Yu, 2017). For multiplayer online battle arena games and first-person shooter games, researchers reported how the role preference and game actions entangled with players' Big Five personalities (Wang et al, 2019) and other personality traits such as aggression (Delhove and Greitemeyer, 2020). In terms of personality prediction, a number of studies used in-game behaviors to realize personality classification and regression (Bunian et al, 2017;Ammannato and Chiesi, 2020).…”

Individual and Collective Performance Deteriorate in a New Team: A Case Study of CS:GO Tournaments

“…However, papers that were concentrating on team play in eSports mostly evaluated how training and coaching affect team performance [10,11], instead of examining team dynamics and group composition, except a few [12,13,14]. On the other hand, though many existing studies have investigated what impacts video game playing in ad-hoc teams [15,16,17,18], their findings might not be generalized to the contexts of professional tournaments.…”