Do Introverts Play Different Video Games than Extroverts? [VIDEO]
Does my introversion guide what video game genres I Iike to play? This question interested me so much that I sent out a survey that attempts to find any correlation between video games and personality types. Watch to find out what I learned.
Transcript(ish)
Every personality test I’ve ever taken has categorized me as an introvert. I wanted to better understand introversion. So I read this book “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking” by Susan Cain. I was amazed to learn that so many of my everyday behaviors are related to introversion.
I thought these behaviors were due to a general aversion to people–that I was antisocial–but Quiet has taught me that introversion and antisocial aren’t the same. Introverts actually are just more reactive to stimuli, so it takes less stimuli to be mentally satisfied. A side effect is that introverts tend to be deep thinkers, they tend to ruminate on situations, and to be clinically depressed.
I’m not a doctor, so I’m certainly simplifying things. Please, keep that in mind.
Now that I possess this newfound understanding of introversion, I starting thinking about my video game preferences and whether or not those are guided by introversion. But rather than just wonder, I decided to put a bit of data to my hunches. I recently sent out a survey that aimed to determine if introverts tend to prefer certain types of video games.
So how did I go about this survey and the analysis of its results? I started with a hypotheses. I figured that game genres I love–walking simulators, RPGs, puzzle games–I love because of their lack of forced stimuli. The player is generally able to control the pace of the game, and therefore can respond to stimuli at their leisure. This is opposed to genres like sports games, survival horror, and fighting games that generally force the player’s pace.
So what did I find out? Well, before I provide my results, a request. Before commenting below about all the areas where my logic is flawed, please see the description for a list of things that I already know make my survey flawed. This survey isn’t about actionable science. It’s more about me being a giant nerd.
Of the 80 respondents, just over half exhibited more characteristics that lean toward introversion compared to 35% that lean toward extroversion and just under 14% that lean toward ambiversion (ambiversion being a combination of the two with no disposition toward either). These findings are interesting to me, as it would seem to indicate gamers tend to be introverted. However, Introverts tend to express themselves better in writing than in person, so it’s possible that my sourcing method–asking people on Twitter and in video game forums–indicate that I may be starting with an unfairly weighted group.
Next let’s look at game genres and see if introverts prefer certain types of games. In this survey, the range was 1-5, with 1 indicating a hatred of the genre and 5 indicating a love of the genre. Looking just at the average rating of introvert responses, Platfomers, Beat’em Ups, RPGs, and Puzzle games rank high. Aside from Beat’em Ups, this aligns with my original hypothesis. Great.
However, when we expand the data to compare these findings to extrovert ratings and ambivert ratings, we see that actually ratings are pretty similar across each personality type.
But let’s go further. My hypothesis placed me as the control, so next I want to see how my initial assumptions compare to reality. Here you can see the personality type I assumed would rate each genre highest next to the actual results. The Green cells indicate where I’m correct. You can see, I’m not very correct.
So what does all of this mean? Well, keeping the many caveats in mind (please read the description for those) it’s possible that gamers have a tendency toward introversion, but there’s no relationship between game genre preference and the degree of introversion.
What are your thoughts? Are you an introvert or extrovert? What genres do you prefer? Do you feel there is a correlation?
Also, let me know what you think of this video. Do you like the data focused approach? Do you hate it?
A huge thank you to all of you who responded to my survey!
Please like, subscribe, and click the Bell icon to make sure you don’t miss future videos. And if you are still watching this video, you obviously like it, right? So, please share.
Caveats and known flaws with my methodology
- Is the sample size too small and therefore not representative of the worldwide gaming community? I had 80 respondents to my survey. If I really wanted to have valid data, I’d need about 2,400 respondents (assuming 155,000,000 US gamers). 80 respondents at an 95% confidence level means I have a 10.96% margin of error. Ugh. (calculated using https://www.checkmarket.com/sample-size-calculator/)
- Am I correctly assigning type (introvert/extrovert/neither). For these findings I simply assigned each respondent a type based on which type had the majority of true answers. I don’t know if this is scientifically the best approach.
- Are the genre too interpretative? Is Fallout a FPS or an RPG, for example?
- Introverts tend to express themselves better in writing, so does my sourcing of survey respondents from an online forum indicate that I may be starting with an unfairly weighted group?
- Are games simply too multi-faceted to be categorized into simple genres. For example, I could like a game because I connected with a single character, even though the genre is one I generally don’t like.
- Survey respondents were aware prior to taking the survey that I was trying to correlate personality type with game preference.
Read
“Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking” by Susan Cain: https://www.amazon.com/Quiet-Power-Introverts-World-Talking/dp/0307352153
Music Credits
8bit Dungeon Level Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
