Project Mid or Feed: A Study on the Personality Traits, Gaming Motivations, and Hero Choices of Dota 2 Players

 ★ Note (2/13/18): I forgot to put a note here as early as last December but upon reanalyzing my data I found out errors in the computation of personality traits averages, so the numbers here are bloated up. I have revised it in my paper but I would need some time to edit this infograph and my write-up, which will include further analysis on the relationship between personality traits, gaming motivations, and hero choices of Dota 2 players.  

Introduction

I conducted a survey for a research paper in my graduate class in Psychology about the personality traits, motivations for playing, and hero choices of Dota 2 players.  I would like to share the results I got here, but please take note that this is done as a way for us to practice the survey research method. I am also not a licensed psychometrician or psychologist (yet) and I’m still on my second year in MA Psychology.

Problems Encountered

First, I would like to outline several problems that I encountered in my study:

Reliability 

The Big Five Inventory is widely used as a personality test, so we have no problems with that. However, the gaming motivations I used, wherein I combined items from Yee's Scale, Motivations for Play in Online Games, (2007) and Demotroviks, et al's Motives for Online Gaming Questionnaire (2011), plus my own, still needs to be checked for reliability and validity. 

The Gaming Motivations Scale tackles 9 different components, but only were reliable. In simpler terms, the questions used for each of the motivation components being measured were consistent with each other in measuring the same concept. Here are the magic Cronbach alpha values:   

• Advancement: a = .790
• Leadership: a = .830
• Coping = .779
• Escape = .895

With this, interpreting the results of the gaming motivations found to be unreliable (Teamwork, Competition, etc) should proceed with caution. In case you guys are still curious about them, I will still be sharing the results for each of the components of motivation. If you also want to see the distribution of scores for each question in the motivation scale, you may view this gallery I made.   

Unequal Sample Sizes 

Server

I posted the survey on Facebook groups where I managed to get most of the SEA participants. I also posted this on Discord servers and Reddit, but it didn’t gain enough traction and thus I got less respondents from NA and EU. [I’m working on another paper so please help me get a better sample for this hehe]

Gender

At some point people would agree that there are more male Dota 2 players than Females or people that identify with other genders. From a pool of 916 valid responses, only 60 are Females, and 12 are from other genders, which I think is still too small. I think a bit more effort can be done on my part to get more respondents from other gender identities.    

Overall Results

 From here on I’ll be discussing the overall results of the study. Tables and graphs for the visual people are uploaded in this gallery and for those who know how to read box-plots, I made one here to show the distribution of scores and outliers.   

In total, the number of valid responses is 916, with more than half [N = 519] are people who mostly play in the SEA servers. Respondents range from 12 (btw) to 37 years old, but a majority of the respondents are around 21 years old [M = 21.253, SD = 0.126]. 

Hero Roles

Most Preferred Role 

Pretty much balanced with 56% Core players and 44% Support players    uploaded. 

Most Played Role

51% of the respondents indicated that they mostly play Support than Core [M = 49%].

Hero Choices

 Since there are a lot of heroes, I included the top 1 most preferred and most played heroes. Both of which shows Crystal Maiden at the top, closely followed by Invoker.   

Personality Traits of Dota 2 Players

I used a 44-item Big Five Inventory Scale to measure the personality traits of a total of 916 Dota 2 players. As mentioned earlier, please take note of the different sample sizes per region as indicated in the following table:

Extraversion

The worldwide average for Extraversion is 58.61% [SD = 0.158], which pretty much shows that there is a balance between introverts and extraverts. I would say that the notion that “all gamers shut themselves inside their rooms and avoids going out to socialize” is fake news. Extreme cases for both ends of the extraversion spectrum exist, but the majority is pretty much in the middle.  

Agreeableness

Overall, Dota 2 players score 69.16% [SD = .118] in agreeableness. This trait tells us that high scorers are typically polite and will adjust their behavior around other people. Moderately high than what we expected, but I’ll take it. Also, there’s always the chance that people rate themselves highly but I trust you guys. On a brighter side, maybe your raging noob SF mid is actually an angel irl, but he’s just having a bad day and he’s just easily triggered. Or maybe he’s Case no. 653 who has 28.9% Agreeableness and spams Venomancer. [True story bruh]. 

Conscientiousness

In general, Dota 2 players score 70.04% [SD = 0.140] in conscientiousness. This measures how hard-working or organized people are. I guess if we’re still playing Dotes even if it’s a complicated and infuriating game (that makes you want to quit 4676 times), then we’re probably high in conscientiousness. Now you can tell your mom you’re actually a hardworking person. *wink* 

Neuroticism

I’m personally interested in this one, and I thought we’ll probably have >80% neuroticism given all the rage-quitters and whiners that we have in Dota 2 and Reddit (huehue). Having high neuroticism means that people have a higher tendency to be moody, tense, depressed, or irritable. Sounds like your average Dota 2 player but according to my stats (stats don’t lie*), the average player scores 58.01% in Neuroticism [SD = 0.145]. On a side note, it would be interesting to test this in a controlled gaming environment if it goes higher after playing with an Anti-Mage that goes shadow blade before boots. 

Openness

Dota 2 players, on the average, scores 71.93% [SD = 0.138] in openness. Highest score we have on a personality trait. High scorers are people who like to seek and try out new experiences and are very creative. I would say these are players who like fucking around with their builds (Greaves on a support Razor or Viper, why not?) and people who are accepting of silly-build players. In general, we are accepting people. We may trashtalk our maelstrom Techies a lot, but in the end, it’s just another weird match for us.  It also shows in how we become verryyyyy accepting of patches am I right, Reddit?

Gaming Motivations 

To save space, I’ll discuss the four components which scales I found to be reliable. The figures I linked includes all nine components but please take note that the five other components still need to be improved. 

Advancement

This tackles how motivated a person is in gaining level and gold advantage in the game. The average score worldwide is 75.36% [N = 916, SD = 0.161] which shows to be valid in Dota 2, where getting a gold and experience advantage is rewarded, and throwing is heavily punished. 

Leadership

On average, Dota 2 players score 69.21% [SD = 0.238] in leadership. When I presented the SEA results from my study [N = 519, M = 69.42%, SD = 0.230] for a Focus Group Discussion among Dota 2 players from our uni’s gaming organization, they pointed out that they experience a lot of people in their games who are very demanding, which is not exactly a proper form of leadership. True leaders are rarer than players who merely like calling shots and commanding others to do what they believe is right. 

Coping

This measures how people play games as a form of stress relief or coping mechanism. On average, most players are 70.62% motivated to play games to cope with real life problems. Games, especially Dota 2, takes a lot of concentration – 5  seconds looking away from the screen can be a missed creep or an incoming smoke gank – which makes it a really good distraction your shitty life. The problem is when people make the game too toxic, which even makes us feel worse. 

Escape

Kinda similar to coping, but this one tackles more about playing to escape real life problems. It stands high at 76.80% [SD = 0.253]. I think the takeaway here is that, we have to remember that a lot of people play this game not just as a form of entertainment [Recreation, M = 83.48%] but also to cope with personal stuff, and more so escape the worries of reality. So, the next time you hit that find match button, please be more understanding of your teammates. We’re all just s a d b o y s who just want to play some games and forget about reality for an hour (or so if you have Techies). If they flame you first just mute and report them lol. 

Statistical Analyses

I made simple correlations with each trait and components of motivation but it needs more work. This semester, I’m also using this dataset for regression analyses in my psych stat class. I’m still working on it, and I hope I can share it here in the future.    

TL;DR

I made a study about Dota 2 player personalities, motivations for playing, and hero choices using the survey research method. I outline and explain the results and how I think it applies to Dota 2.  

Researcher's Note and Request!!!

Thank you to everyone who checked out my post and read through everything! If you have questions, I’m always lurking on Discord. By the way, if you like this kind of study, I would really appreciate it if you guys can help me on another paper I’m making for class. This time I’m trying to make a psychological measurement scale for esports players, and I need professional and casual players to answer my survey. If you’re connected to some pro players I would be really thankful if you can ask them to answer the scale. T ^ T

References

Demetrovics Z, Urban R, Nagygyorgy K, et al. (2011). Why do you play? The development of the motives for online gaming questionnaire (MOGQ). Behavior Research Methods, 43, 814–825. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/51046538_Why_do_you_play_The_development_of_the_Motives_for_Online_Gaming_Questionnaire_MOGQ 

Yee, N. (2007). Motivations of Play in Online Games. Journal of Cyber Psychology and Behavior, 9, 772-775. Retrieved from https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/2d8d/3e2a295dea29a7f900033848039dcb55dbf7.pdf.