Many of us enjoy spending time together playing video games.
We team up to fight a big boss, we compete against each other for resources
and of course the bragging rights, and we dance together in gaming lobbies.
Not surprisingly, these shared social interactions helped video games to become one of the most
popular leisure activities worldwide.
Social play offers many known benefits, such as combating loneliness and helping players
to improve their well-being.
However, in-game social interactions may also cause harm like experiencing rude behaviour
of other players, being excluded by team members or even cyberbullying.
These negative experiences can not only affect the overall game experience but also the in-game
performance and can have severe consequences for the player’s mental health.
On the other side, game companies are also affected because harmful social interactions
in-game may cause players to abandon the harmful game in order to find a more benevolent gaming
community.
Researchers as well as game designers have been looking to understand the origins of
such harmful social behaviour in online games and have examined personality traits, which
may be linked to specific harmful in-game behaviour.
One often associated personality trait is psychopathy.
In the context of digital games, it may be possible that personal character traits, such
as psychopathy, may manifest in in-game behaviours that may be considered harmful or toxic by
other players, such as the usage of toxic language or the violation of personal space
and in-game etiquette.
Yet, it’s not clear whether these personality traits manifest in-game.
Psychopathy is characterized by a lack of remorse, and inability to feel empathy, and
a degree of ruthlessness with a tendency to exploit others and violate social norms and
expectations.
On its extreme ends, individuals with high levels on psychopathic traits have been associated
with personality disorders or even criminal activities.
However, psychopathy is a personality trait that exists along a spectrum within the general
population.
The triarchic model of psychopathy suggests that this construct is compromised of three
factors: • Disinhibition or also impulsivity
• Boldness • And Meanness.
Outside of digital games, elevated psychopathy has been associated with specific behaviours
that are typical of harmful social interaction.
For example: psychopathy has been associated with
• elevated retaliation for perceived provocation, • more usage of swearing,
• harassment trolling within the context of online dating.
• Furthermore, individuals with elevated psychopathic traits have been shown to disrespect
the social space around another human more often than other individuals.
So can these behaviours also manifest in-game?
Prior research shows for example that players carry their beliefs, personality, motives,
and even their level of self-esteem into their gaming behaviour.
However, there are also reasons to believe that psychopathic traits may not manifest
in games: Games allow their players to enact different roles in-games, which does not match
their personality in the real world.
Furthermore, individuals with elevated psychopathy traits often present themselves as charming
to others, their in-game responses may also follow this pattern.
Overall, only little work has investigated links between psychopathy and gaming, which
focussed on elevated interest in violent game content and not on behaviours that manifest
during gaming.
Therefore, in this paper, we investigate how psychopathic personality traits manifest in
social interactions within digital games and conducted an online experiment.
For this paper, we focused on the following three aspects of the in-game behaviour which
may be biased through psychopathic traits: • The perception of emotion
• The way we communicate with other players • And the In-game movement behaviour
In our experiment, we asked participants to fulfill a gaming-task: First, we asked participants
to create their own avatar to increase their social presence in-game.
After that the game started.
In the game, players had to find a team in a skyscraper, where two elevators led to different
levels in the building.
After the tutorial finished, an NPC was present.
This NPC showed either a friendly and inviting gesture with a friendly message to the player
or a threatening gesture combined with a rude message.
Next, the player was instructed to approach the NPC and stop at a comfortable distance
to the NPC.
Once players confirmed this distance, a conversation with the NPC started.
In the conversation, players had to ask the NPC which elevator they should take in order
to find the team they were looking for.
The NPC either responded in a friendly manner or insulted the player once again and then
named the floor number for the team.
After that, players had to decide which elevator they must take and move towards the answered
doors.
After confirming their selection, the task ended.
In total, players performed 20 repetitions.
We used the Triarchic Psychopathy measure by Patrick et al. to measure the three main
aspects of psychopathy: Boldness, meanness, and disinhibition.
Furthermore, we asked participants to rate the perceived emotion of the NPC on a scale
from 0 – very friendly up to 100 – very angry.
We used the LIWC-2015 tool to analyze the psycholinguistic features of the player’s
conversation with the NPC.
We focused on the question how many swear words and how many social words players used
when communicating with the NPC.
Additionally, we analyzed the preferred interpersonal distance to the NPC and the movement behaviour
around the NPC.
In total we had 385 participants in this experiment.
For further information about the demographics and details about the task and measurements
please refer to our paper in the ACM digital library.
In summary, we observed that: - Players with higher boldness and meanness
rated the emotion of the NPC as angrier, regardless of its emotion.
For disinhibition, this relationship only held for angry NPCs.
- Players with lower boldness, meanness, and disinhibition used more social words in their
interactions with the NPC.
This relationship was stronger for the neutral NPC.
- All players used more swear words for the angry than the neutral NPC.
However, when interacting with the angry NPC, players with higher boldness also used more
swear words.
- All players regulated their interpersonal distance to the NPC based on its emotion,
stopping farther from the angry NPC, than the neutral one.
However, players higher in boldness and lower in disinhibition stopped closer to the NPC
in general.
When interacting with the angry NPC, players higher in meanness stopped closer to the NPC.
- Players with elevated boldness and meanness altered their movement path around the NPC
staying consistently closer to the NPC when moving past them.
Our findings provide new insights into how trait psychopathy manifests in social behaviours
within digital games, expressed in our study through player perceptions, use of language
in communicating with the NPC, and violation of the NPC’s personal space.
An initial step in preventing problematic gaming communities is to understand how, and
for whom, harmful social interactions unfold.
Our work adds to this understanding, with the hope of leading toward safer gaming spaces
that all players can access to receive the myriad benefits of social gaming.
For further questions, please refer to our paper at the ACM digital library.
Thank you very much for watching.