What Your Archmage Build Says About You

[Michael Cook]

What Your Archmage Build Says About You

An information-gathering Neverwinter Nights mod could someday lead to games that change to suit your personality.

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[EvilPicnic]

This is actually really fascinating - one of the best articles on the Escapist for a while, thank you.

 

[DasDestroyer]

Hmm... now that I think about it, I do talk mostly with friendly NPCs, not rude ones... :O

 

[jericu]

Where can I find his research paper? It sounds fascinating.

 

[eventhorizon525]

Not sure I've ever wanted to read a published article as much as I do now. This sounds surprisingly interesting (and I'm curious to see where it would "type" me as compared to how I play).

 

[maxben]

Someone really needs to make a personality quiz based on this research.
I think it would be really funny to see.

 

[Richardplex]

I wonder how people's personalities correlate to the personalities people RP as in games. This would have to be taken into account for RPGs, and would be quite interesting.

 

[cefm]

A somewhat simpler approach might be to analyze which kinds of people tended to favor which kinds of character builds (sneaky, weak-caster, hack&slasher, ranged, mixed, etc.) and then design slightly different experiences for each class (alternate layouts for areas, different enemy group compositions, as well as different NPC interactions and quests). That is something that you could do a lot easier than on-the-fly reprogramming of the game. Plus you can generalize pretty easily and with fairly accurate results that a person who initially prefers the mage character has a slightly different approach to things than the person who initially prefers the barbarian.

 

[Lorechaser]

Very nice. My only worry is that I often like to play games against my style consciously - I'm always light side the first time, but then I like to be dark, I play mate, then fighter, etc. Figuring out what stays the same (I read e dry single conversation branch, for instance ) would be handy.

Hell, I'd be willing to do a personality test a.d then let him watch all my games.

 

[Abedeus]

I just pack all the strongest AoE spells I get plus few curses.

...whoops.

 

[sniddy_v1legacy]

Maybe someone needs to ship the guy to Australia to do a lecture titled

'How to do proper research'

 

[AngryMongoose]

Where can I find his research paper? It sounds fascinating.

This is the one; I believe.
http://ticc.uvt.nl/~pspronck/pubs/CIG2011Lankveld.pdf

EDIT: It helps if I actually post the link >.<

 

[Ken Sapp]

Interesting, I would like to see this research continued. It would be interesting to see if they could develop a series of games which would do far better in typing people than a questionaire which can be gamed.

It always annoyed me to see a job which required a personality test. Any reasonably intelligent person is going to realize that a company that uses this method is looking for people with certain results and will try to tailor their answers to what they think the desired outcome is. A well written game would be harder to guess especially if it were entertaining enough that the player forgot it was a test

 

[Deminobody]

Absolutely fascinating! I always like to tell people that gaming's real strength as a medium is its interaction with human choices. Research like this should be one of the new directions game developers should explore for improving their games. After all, who wouldn't like a game that was specifically tailored to his or her own tastes?

 

[KingsGambit_v1legacy]

Thanks for an interesting article. As and when any becomes available, actual correlated data would make for a fascinating read. It's an interesting subject just for the psychological perspective. Coming at it from the idea that it holds potential for the changes described to occur in our future games on the fly is quite exciting; though I will reserve judgement on that!

 

[Rad Party God]

Actually, there was already such game that already tried to shape the content and the story, to a varying degree, depending on your actions, even going as far as asking you a series of questions with a psychiatrist and it was a game made for the Wii (eventually released for the PS2 and PSP), it was Silent Hill: Shattered Memories.

I know, first hand, that the game doesn't feature many combat sequences (like any at all) and even the scares aren't that scary when you discover that you only need to shit your pants when the environment starts to freeze (literally), but I still liked this game for other reasons.

The game was supposed to shape the story, it's characters personallity and some subtle details in the environment to be your own experience, at the beginning, the game opens up with a doctor asking you a series of questions and even after that initial questionaire, the game keeps showing you the doctor now and then, asking you more details about your personality, many people would think that the questionaire would be only limited to the doctor, but the game keeps analyzing your actions ingame.

How much do you search the environment for clues or items?, did you look at that girl's breast when she was talking to you?, do you turn around quickly when you hear strange noises?, those and other details are being analized by the game in real time, without you knowing.

Sadly, the game has it's limits, but it's certainly interesting to see how much the game changes when different people plays it, I know I tried, I invited my cousin to play the game and a lot of different things happened to him, compared to my playthrough.

 

[Venereus]

Bethesda must be all over this guy.

 

[DEAD34345]

"PC gamers were more likely to finish the optional quest for Miranda, one of the non-player characters, a quest described by BioWare themselves as having "a touchy-feely plot"."

Oh please, don't make out that the PC players cared more about Miranda's "touchy-feely plot", I think we all know the real reasons she was favoured. The two very large and prominently displayed reasons that pretty much define her entire character.

Other than that part (which just made me laugh), this was a pretty interesting article though. I don't think I'll be reading this guy's paper, but if his ideas are ever properly implemented into a game I would be very interested in playing it.

 

[Dastardly]

What Your Archmage Build Says About You

An information-gathering Neverwinter Nights mod could someday lead to games that change to suit your personality.

Read Full Article

To me, this made a great deal of sense when you consider how often role play is used in therapy, or when trying to learn about psychological issues in children. Watching kids play has always told us a lot, so it's no surprise that watching adults play would do the same.

Play allows us to influence and/or construct our reality. We are given tools, and allowed to use them to act. How we act reveals what some of our natural tendencies are. When the subject of play has so many real-life analogs (like an RPG, with conversations and such), we get some more applicable information.

It's not really breaking any new ground here, we're just broadening our definition of "imagination" and "play" and "role-play" to include video games, I think.