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During the design phase of a computer game decisions have to be made, how the preferences of the user, his playing behavior, gained abilities and his personal characteristics are measured and represented in a model. Usually different types of measures are kept and updated in separate models for style of game play behavior (player model), skills and abilities achieved and proofed during game play (learner model) and more static characteristics of the player’s personality (personality model).
To keep a player immersed into the computer game a continuing measurement and update of the model dimensions is necessary to refine the knowledge about players’ preferences and his changing (growing) set of game-related skills. Thus, the adaptation can choose suitable alternatives of game content and/or learning content and balances the difficulty of challenges with the players’ abilities, well known as maintenance of a flow status (Chen, 2007).
Even though several theories and related, empirically validated, models exist to categorize player behavior into playing style preferences and learning behavior into learning styles, they all have a natural common aspect: they focus on decisions and behavior of the person to model. Concerning such modeling of a person, very sophisticated models exist in psychology that have been refined and empirically proved across manifold cultures and generations. The NEO-FFI (also known as Big-5 model) is a widely accepted model representing a person’s personality in five dimensions. Thus, we investigated how well playing style preferences and learning style characteristics of a person can be predicted by measuring mainly the personality traits. In general, traits refer in the following to independent dimensions, for which a person’s peculiarities are measured and represented on a scale, resulting in a unique profile as a combination of these dimensions. On the contrary, styles and types are rather a set of alternatives to assign the most suitable to a specific person. Still, styles and types most often allow assignment of one or several alternatives using a scale to express how much they apply.
As the NEO-FFI is widely accepted as one of the most precisely models for personality traits, it might be possible to establish a standard on how player models are to be build, measured and how game adaptation may use such models then. Likewise the learning styles could be predicted based on the personality characteristics of a person.
To find the dependencies and correlations among the models to predict player type and learning styles from personality traits of a person, we describe in the following sections the used models in more detail, how we setup the study and discuss the results.
We use the NEO-FFI model as an accepted model representing a person’s personality. This work is focusing on the possibility to predict (game relevant) preferences of a person by knowing the person’s personality values. It is not intended to deepen the discussion about what personality is. Hence, a common personality model (Big-5) is used, even though there may be other suitable concepts of what personality is.