By Nelson Schneider - 06/23/24 at 02:09 PM CT
I remember back in primary school when the administration was desperate to figure out what made students tick. Instead of allowing students to “self-identify” and filter ourselves into increasingly-bizarre social Identity groups, as is happening today, we were, instead, given two different Personality Tests, one of which was the perennially popular Myers-Briggs 16 Types test.
Back then, I typed-out as an INTP, but upon taking the test again 30 years later, I’ve turned into an INTJ – ironically the same as my Troll-Dad, with whom I constantly butted heads – with the key difference being that, as a kid I was disorganized and erratic, but as an adult I meticulously keep track of things and make lists because I no longer have a parent to do that kind of mundane stuff for me, and if something isn’t written down somewhere, I WILL forget about it.
Recently I learned that, back in the halcyon pre-plague days of 2019, a company called Quantic Foundry started doing personality research directly focused on figuring out what makes Gamers, specifically, tick. Of course, neither the Myers-Briggs people nor Quantic Foundry are doing all of this psychological research for altruistic purposes. The purpose of Myers-Briggs, after all, was to sort students into buckets that could then be dumped into a variety of different worker training/education tracks. Likewise, Quantic Foundry’s end goal seems to be enabling game publishers to sort Gamers into a handful of different audiences, allowing them to create games that are irresistible to a specific target demographic, spurring increased sales numbers and/or microtransactions.
Of course, Quantic Foundry needs to make money too, so, unfortunately, the only way to get full access to the 2024-updated version of their 5-year-long study of Gamer Motivation is to shell-out $2,950 for the privilege. However, as an intuitive and thoughtful person (the N and the T in my Myers-Briggs type), it’s possible to form some interesting conclusions based on the piecemeal bits of data that aren’t paywalled.
Anyway, when I took their online assessment, I, unsurprisingly, ended up as a dual-type Gamer, with “Architect” as my primary Type, followed by “Slayer” as my secondary Type, nearly maxing out the motivation of “Immersion” at 93% and with a strong desire for the “Design” sub-component of “Creativity” at 73%. It’s also unsurprising that I don’t give a flying fig about “Mastery” or “Action,” with 11% and 10% respectively, thanks to the “Challenge” and “Excitement” sub-components bottoming-out at 2% relevance.
I find all of this Gamer-specific data to be quite interesting. As a matter of fact, during my sophomore year of college, I collected similar data for the final project in my 400-level Statistics course. My own results found correlation between what Quantic Foundry classifies as “Immersion” and “Creativity” components with introversion, low levels of television consumption, and higher social class, while the “opposite” motivations of “Action,” “Mastery,” and “Achievement” were generally associated with extroversion and lower social class.
What about you, MeltedJoystick readers? Take the test for free and share your results in the comments section. Do your tested motivations match your expectations? Do birds of a feather truly flock together?
