TTRPG players wanted for online psychology study

[Steven Samuel]

Will be closing this end Sunday 2nd November then analysing. Thank you all for your help! Will summarise results back here when known.

 

[Longspeak]

Seriously, coming here with that... the slider for how long you've been playing needs to go to 50.

 

[FriendlyFiend]

Phew! Just squeaked in in time. It’ll be fascinating to learn a bit about your results.

 

[Steven Samuel]

Seriously, coming here with that... the slider for how long you've been playing needs to go to 50.

Thank you for your help! Yup, given the number of comments I've had about that next time I will be sure to change that!

 

[Steven Samuel]

Phew! Just squeaked in in time. It’ll be fascinating to learn a bit about your results.

Thank you for your help!

 

[Steven Samuel]

Still going through the data but some first really interesting findings have emerged.

So, there were a total of 319 people who completed the survey and passed the attention checks. Average age of 39, mostly male. All recruited via various TTRPG forums like this.

To the question: "Imagine your player-character was aided an important way by another player-character. Would you feel grateful to the real person playing the character?"

75% said yes. Overwhelming majority. 11% said no, and 15% not sure.

To the question: "Imagine your player-character was promised something important by another player-character. However, your player-character was betrayed by the other player-character. Would you feel angry with the real person playing the character?"

Now 62% said NO. Only 17% said yes, with the rest unsure.

I mentioned this finding to Jon Peterson (RPG historian) and he thought this might reflect gamers' desire not to take other players' harmful actions against their characters personally. I thought it could mean that players might be surprised (pleasantly) when other players do them a good turn, but expect the opposite.

Another interesting but perhaps less surprising finding was that older age correlated negatively with power gaming (maximising rules to one's advantage) and positively with a greater emphasis on realistic simulation in gaming.

Thank you all for your help! Will post more as it's analysed.

 

[Steven Samuel]

Thank you to all those who participated in my TTRPG study last year. The first main finding is now being considered for publication in a psychology journal. Results showed that gamers who play characters that they consider more different from themselves report greater perspective taking skills than people who play characters more similar to themselves. This makes sense in the context of the extra effort required to step into the shoes of a different personality, and suggests (but does not prove) that playing unfamiliar characters might enhance perspective taking in life more generally. The summary (abstract) is as follows:

In tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) like Dungeons & Dragons, players act not as themselves but as a fictional character in a fantasy world. Often this involves making in-game choices based not on what the player would like to do but what the player believes the character would do, i.e. perspective taking. It has been speculated that role-playing might enhance the ability to understand others’ perspectives, but no rigorous quantitative work on the hypothesis has yet been conducted. In a survey of over 300 experienced TTRPG players, greater time spent role-playing characters that are markedly more different from one’s self was significantly associated with higher scores on the perspective-taking subscale of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index. This association persisted even when a measure of autistic traits (the AQ) was included in the same model. These results suggest that there is value in future work investigating a potential causative role for TTRPG experience in enhancing perspective taking and add to the evidence that the ability to understand others’ mental states might be flexible even in adulthood.

Anyone interested in reading the full article can find it here: OSF. I have a channel that discusses the psychology of RPGs and some other findings on YouTube: RPG Psychology.

I'm expecting another publication to come from the same study, this time relating to what attracts autistic people and people with greater autistic traits to TTRPGs.

 

[The Firebird]

Thank you to all those who participated in my TTRPG study last year. The first main finding is now being considered for publication in a psychology journal. Results showed that gamers who play characters that they consider more different from themselves report greater perspective taking skills than people who play characters more similar to themselves. This makes sense in the context of the extra effort required to step into the shoes of a different personality, and suggests (but does not prove) that playing unfamiliar characters might enhance perspective taking in life more generally. The summary (abstract) is as follows:

In tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) like Dungeons & Dragons, players act not as themselves but as a fictional character in a fantasy world. Often this involves making in-game choices based not on what the player would like to do but what the player believes the character would do, i.e. perspective taking. It has been speculated that role-playing might enhance the ability to understand others’ perspectives, but no rigorous quantitative work on the hypothesis has yet been conducted. In a survey of over 300 experienced TTRPG players, greater time spent role-playing characters that are markedly more different from one’s self was significantly associated with higher scores on the perspective-taking subscale of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index. This association persisted even when a measure of autistic traits (the AQ) was included in the same model. These results suggest that there is value in future work investigating a potential causative role for TTRPG experience in enhancing perspective taking and add to the evidence that the ability to understand others’ mental states might be flexible even in adulthood.

Anyone interested in reading the full article can find it here: OSF. I have a channel that discusses the psychology of RPGs and some other findings on YouTube: RPG Psychology.

I'm expecting another publication to come from the same study, this time relating to what attracts autistic people and people with greater autistic traits to TTRPGs.

I appreciate you coming back to share the publication! It's an intriguing result. Best of luck with the publication process!