Is Extraversion Linked To Attitudes In Choosing Male Or Female Characters In Games?

By Franky Dominguez, Lance Mendoza, Matthew Tung

1. Introduction

Gaming and the perspective of gamers have changed significantly as the US society has continued to evolve into a more socially accepting society than before. A male’s physical appearance no longer completely dominates the video game and virtual reality realm; instead, developers prefer a more gender-neutral cast of characters. As people are allowed to choose the character they play, it would be very interesting to grasp why players choose these specific characters over others. If we are able to deduce why people are choosing specific characters, we can design better characters that compete with the player’s attention rather than everyone choosing the same characters in the virtual realm. As there are more female representations than before in video games, we ponder upon the idea of what specific personality traits make a person choose whether or not they should choose either character’s gender in a video game. Could people with higher traits of Conscientiousness, Extraversion, or Agreeableness choose a specific character gender over another?

A feature of many video games includes character creation, where players can usually pick the gender of the character they want to play in the game. Doing this can be purely for aesthetic or perhaps arbitrary personal reasons. In such cases as in MMORPGs or in Pokemon, character gender does not affect the overall storyline. Compared to games such as Fire Emblem and Lost Ark, some storylines and Character Classes are blocked depending on the gender chosen for your character. Gender choice in games has given players the ability to explore and play with gender identity; it’s an interesting topic to explore as to reasons why players pick the gender they pick in-game when gender does not have a significant impact narrative-wise. We want to focus on looking at possible traits that may contribute to why players choose their game character’s gender during situations where character gender identity choice is more of a matter of self-expression.

For this research project, we will be going over Extraversion after evaluating which personality trait may lead to a higher chance of choosing a specific character gender over the other. The research question we will be examining is, does extraversion affect people’s attitudes in choosing male or female characters in games? We define extraversion as a personality trait that leads a person to have a higher social, outgoing, positive, or greater amount of external affairs. We are specifically using the genders of male or female as it is a more standardized practice in the virtual realm. However, we acknowledge that there are other genders not standard in the development process. We hypothesize that the extraversion personality trait has no significance in choosing gender character selection.

For our study, we will be using the independent variable, the Extraversion Trait, the dependent variable of the gender of a character being chosen by the player, and our control variable is our survey Qualtrics, where the type of questions being asked are predictive. We hope that our findings in this study will spur more studies on design, influencing the games and virtual reality industry in building better characters for players to enjoy.

2. Methods

For our Quantitative research study, we collected data from participants willing to participate in our survey. Originally we had a gamified questionnaire that allowed visuals to help players to make choices, but we had to abandon that software due to technical difficulties. We converted our gamified questionnaire to a Qualtrics survey, where we collected data on whether players chose either male or female and measured how extroverted they were based on their responses. We used data logging on our participants, collecting data every time a user interacted with our data.

We did a correlation research survey design in Qualtrics and opted out of using Studycrafter as our previous mode to distribute the survey. Moving forward with Qualtrics, participants were tasked to complete a Likert scale questionnaire from which we derived our data and analyzed participant responses. We asked participants to answer eight questions, including the first question on measuring the male or female choice response. We intentionally created these eight questions because a previous study highlighted that eight specific traits measured Extraversion validly. We also did not want to create an ongoing list of questions we would have to validate on the Extraversion trait and then ask participants to answer them.

Below are our survey questions and answer choices to the questions we asked:

Ordinal Measurement Scale: [Very unlikely — Unlikely — Neutral — Likely — Very likely]

To start the survey, the player chooses a character: Male or Female

1) Talkative Ideas

• [Event Description]: You are at an orientation event with your fellow new student cohort. How likely are you to go and introduce yourself to one of your cohort students?
• [Very unlikely — Unlikely — Neutral — Likely — Very likely]

2) Reserved Ideas

• [Event Description]: You’re deciding where to eat among your group of 5 friends. How likely are you to say what you want first?
• [Very unlikely — Unlikely — Neutral — Likely — Very likely]

3) Full of Energy

• [Event Description]: You are at a nightclub and everyone is dancing. How likely are you to start dancing?
• [Very unlikely — Unlikely — Neutral — Likely — Very likely]

4) Generates a lot of Enthusiasm

• [Event Description]: You are at an Amusement Park and have always wanted to ride Aeroshaker but the line to wait is an hour. How likely are you to wait an hour for the ride?
• [Very unlikely — Unlikely — Neutral — Likely — Very likely]

5) Tends to be Quiet

• [Event Description]: You are at a party with all your friends and some new acquaintances. How likely are you to talk in this setting?
• [Very unlikely — Unlikely — Neutral — Likely — Very likely]

6) Has an Assertive Personality

• [Event Description]: You are living with your friend and they didn’t clean the dishes and left them in the sink for 2 days. How likely are you to call out your friend?
• [Very unlikely — Unlikely — Neutral — Likely — Very likely]

7) Shy or Inhibited

• [Event Description]: You signed up for a dating app and saw someone that you are strongly interested in. How likely are you to message the person?
• [Very unlikely — Unlikely — Neutral — Likely — Very likely]

8) Outgoing and Sociable

• [Event Description]: You’re going to watch the new star wars movie at the theaters with your group of friends and see another group wearing star wars shirts and accessories. How likely are you to be sociable and meet them?
• [Very unlikely — Unlikely — Neutral — Likely — Very likely]

We collected our participants from the UC Santa Cruz campus, including others we met in real life willing to participate in the survey. The age group of our participants were between 22–30 years of age. In total, we collected 20 participants from participating in our survey we made using Qualtrics.

As the survey was online, we randomly recruited our participants by putting the survey in a student channel where students congregated. We recruited participants through Discord, Slack, and verbal confirmation channels. We made a firm stand that the survey should be taken seriously; it does not take a lot of time and should be completed if the student engages in the survey. As the different recruitment channels comprised mostly college students, we suspect they answered the survey honestly and as best as they could.

We randomly selected participants at the UCSC campus based on their answers if they wanted to participate in our survey using verbal and typed willingness consent. We conducted correlational analysis, using Pearson’s R.

3. Results

A table of the distribution of responses ordered by their respective question and extraversion trait aspect is found below. Note that the Big 5 Personality Test did a reverse scaling on the qualities for Q2: Reserved, Q5: Tends to be Quiet, and Q7: Shy/Inhibited. We framed the question where a reverse scaling calculation was not needed.

Table displaying the average, high, and low extraversion scores for male and female

Bar chart visualizing the number of people who had the same extraversion score

4. Discussion

Our data lead to insignificant results and cannot be used for correlational significance or to infer anything. While we can’t provide any correlational analysis between individuals who picked Male or those who picked Female, looking into the distribution of scores on specific questions was interesting to explore.

Below are some of our sample questions and results from our survey:

Our survey set out to measure extraversion through scoring several traits related to extraversion according to the Big 5 Personality Test.

In our survey, question 4 measured enthusiasm. The response distribution was slightly skewed toward Likely/Very Likely. Because 11/20 (55%) selected Likely/Very Likely, those people believe the tradeoff between waiting an hr and getting to ride the Aeroshaker is worth it. Those people might also feel like an hr long wait isn’t very long compared to the people who chose Very Unlikely/Unlikely. Furthermore, this scenario presents an imaginary ride in which the participant has “always wanted” to go on it, affecting how the participant perceives how the ride may seem and make them feel;. This may result in why our response distribution was slightly skewed toward Likely/Very Likely.

Response Distribution for Q4

You are at an Amusement Park and have always wanted to ride Aeroshaker but the line to wait is an hour. How likely are you to wait an hour for the ride?

Question 6 on our survey measured assertiveness. The distribution of responses were skewed towards the Likely side of things. With most of our responses coming from grad students living in the Bay Area as a result of convenience sampling, it’s likely that they live with roommates given the high cost of living. So this skewed result may perhaps be caused by already having experienced calling out your friend for leaving dishes and doing so having positive results since they answered they’re likely to do it. Further studies looking into assertiveness to navigate cohabitation spaces may be of interest.

Response Distribution for Q6

You are living with your friend and they didn’t clean the dishes and left them in the sink for 2 days. How likely are you to call out your friend?

5. Limitations and Future Works

One limitation was gathering enough survey data, especially having more equally distributed responses for gender selections. Furthermore, we had a limited number of participants so that we wouldn’t make any conclusions or correlations to our research question. Also, we recognize that some of these extraversion scenarios may have different interpretations from people. A better study design would allow participants to visually see the character and judge whether to pick a male or female character. It would also be helpful if we were able to garner hundreds of participants and perhaps turn the study instead of Quantitative research into a Mixed Method research. Possible future research may include why females utilize voice masking software while playing games or choose male avatars while gaming, perhaps leading to a study on how females are treated poorly in games.

We hope our study can be an initial reference point in determining what aspects affect game character selection. A few aspects that can be considered are the context and design of when choosing a character.

6. Conclusion

In our study, we wanted to look at the correlation between a person’s character gender choice and how extroverted they are. We initially created a gamified survey where a player goes through a sort of “visual novel scenario” and were tasked to answer the survey questions along the way to progress. We switched to a Qualtrics survey in the end due to technical difficulties. From our results, we found that our data was not significant and was not really a good fit for a correlational analysis. This led us to look at the data’s descriptive statistics and look at any interesting patterns that may have emerged from them. In question 4, measuring enthusiasm, this scenario represents an imaginary ride that the participant has “always wanted” to go on, perhaps the ride being imaginary may have skewed the results compared to a real rollercoaster attraction that may not be as attractive. In question 6, measuring assertiveness, our data represented graduate students which usually struggle with finances, most likely skewing the data as they would likely need to maintain a positive relationship with their roommate.

Stepping away from emerging data and going back to our results, our survey seemed like it was greatly skewed towards male characters instead of female characters. This could be due to how we did not have visuals in our survey, but instead asked individuals to fill in our questionnaire. However, we believe if we had hundreds of participants we can infer a better understanding to our research question, “Does extraversion affect people’s attitudes in choosing male or female characters in games?”. For now we weren’t able to conclude any results and as a result we turned our research into negative results. What are negative results in our Quantitative research? Negative results are complete data sets that do not support our research question, null hypothesis or nullify the aim of the research. For future works a better study would be, “why do female players choose male avatars?”, instead of “does extraversion affect people’s attitudes in choosing male or female characters in games?” based on the results of our survey.

Link to StudyCrafter: StudyCrafter is a free engine to empower users to create, play, share and analyze gamified projects
https://studycrafter.com/

Sample of our Studycrafter gamefied game survey to answer the question, “Does extraversion affect people’s attitudes in choosing male or female characters in games?”