Students’ game playing preferences and personality traits

This study aims to explore students’ personality traits and game playing preferences at a teacher-training institute in Hong Kong. In psychology, the Big-Five personality factors have been defined as Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. These factors are widely used in the literature to measure a person’s personality traits. In video gaming, players usually have preferences over different game genres. Games can be categorized into genres such as Action, Strategy, Adventure, Role-playing, Sports, Simulation and Puzzle. In this research, it is hypothesized that game players with certain personality traits would prefer certain types of games. The 50-item IPIP version of the Big-Five Markers was used to measure the students’ personality traits (n=160). A questionnaire was used to measure the students’ gaming preferences on the seven game genres. A quantitative analysis was used to evaluate the relationship and significances among the variates and the results are discussed. The statistically significant relationships (either positively or negatively) between personality traits and preferences on game genres were identified. Copyright © 2017 The Turkish Online Journal of Educational Technology.