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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dethklok" data-source="post: 6152512" data-attributes="member: 6746469">All right! It's taken a lot of time and effort, but I now have a completed set of 100 responses, and the analysis can begin. Now that the responses are in, I can reveal the hypotheses I am testing; I figure many of you may want to comment on them before the results are in.But before I do, let me give a little big of background. I was introduced to Dungeons and Dragons as a child as a game of the imagination, and that's the way I played roleplaying games growing up. But as I grew more familiar with the hobby and the people who played roleplaying games, I started to notice that this wasn't really a game of the imagination at all. What it was was a game of putting bigger and bigger numbers on a character sheet in a way that represented getting more and more powerful. Most people didn't play rpgs for the reasons that I did - in dimly lit rooms with thematic music, using outside research, character accents, and careful timing trying to capture an imaginative experience; they played to kill monsters, get treasure, and make the next level <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powergaming" target="_blank">"to the exclusion of other considerations such as storytelling, atmosphere and camaraderie."</a> And my sense is that Dungeons and Dragons is designed specifically with the latter goals in mind. Thus, I am very skeptical about claims that rpgs are games of the imagination.Secondarily to this, I've seen many people claim that alignment is meaningless. Knowign what I do about personal values, I doubt this - it seems to me that Liberals and Libertarians should be less Lawful, and that Machiavellian individuals less Good, than people with opposing values.Therefore, my hypotheses are:I. The more people like RPGs, the higher in psychometric "Openness" (a construct referring to imagination and unconventionality) and "Schizotypy" (related to vividity of imagination and to generalized strangeness of experience) they may be. I personally doubt roleplayers will be different from controls in this regard, but this is a hypothesis I consider worth investigating.II. Among those who play RPGs, liking for Dungeons and Dragons, either absolutely or relative to other games, will correlate inversely with Openness.III. When analyzing peoples preferences in roleplaying games, a factor will emerge that broadly pits attitudes towards powergaming against attitudes towards story and aesthetic experience.IV. This powergaming factor will correlate with a liking for D&D (again, either absolute or relative to other games) and negatively with Openness.V. Self-ratings on the Law-Chaos dimension of alignment will correlate with political Libertarianism, so that respondents indicating (for example) belief in the freedom to use Marijuana or own guns will tend towards Chaos.VI. Self-ratings on the Good-Evil dimension of alignment will correlate with Machiavellianism, so that respondents indicating a greater acceptance of lying and manipulation will tend towards Evil.</blockquote>

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