Anyone who has been to university will probably remember the final projects as a time of immense stress and a lot of book readings, in a frantic attempt to prove any thesis you launched a few months before. Looks like we could have studied Animal Crossing, just like psychology student Sam Davern, who is doing his latest study on the psychology of Animal Crossing: New Horizons players. This is you!
Specifically, Sam wants to know if there is a correlation between the behavior of the players in the game and their personality types and the way he realizes that it is by putting yourself in the various achievements of Nook Miles and then doing a quick personality Test. Maybe you are more interested in people than art, so you have many achievements of Nook Miles to visit other islands or make friends with the villagers? I don’t think we’ll know until the poll is completed.
At the end of the survey, you will get a detailed report about your personality and type of player, which can give you some useful information about how you interact with the world and games.
Of course, it’s a totally anonymous poll and it was even approved by the UCC ethics committee, so there’s no need to worry about how your in-game stats might come back to haunt you. However, Sam points out that “there has been very little research in the field of game psychology other than the usual ones,” video games make people more violent, “and there has been virtually no research on social simulation games,” so if the study gets a lot of participants, can very well reach a scientific journal. Captivating!
The survey is now live at animalcrossingsurvey.com and anyone interested can also choose to participate in the draw of a Switch game of their choice.