“You Want to Play a Game?” Detecting Two Personality Traits with Short-Duration Mobile Games

Accurately determining someone’s personality is complex and often requires lengthy questionnaires, which are subject to social desirability bias, or a great amount of users’ interactions with the system. Also, most existing research focuses on broader personality dimensions rather than more granular personality traits, which better characterize a person.

In this work, we propose to implicitly acquire the users’ granular personality traits using mobile short-duration serious games, in < 5 min and in a single play interaction, namely cautiousness and achievement-striving as concept proof, to replace personality questionnaires.

Two platform mobile games were developed, one for each trait, Which Way and Time Travel, respectively. Then, an experiment with real participants (n = 100) was conducted. Time Travel proved to be capable of detecting achievers (get all coins, diamonds, and better scores), while Which Way couldn’t effectively measure cautiousness, although following hard paths could be related to less cautious persons. As expected, significant correlations with other personality traits were also found (15 out of 30), such as anger, modesty, excitement seeking, and adventurousness. Contrary to other types of (serious) games, the results show short-duration mobile minigames are a viable way of unobtrusively determining the users’ granular personality, being the path to replacing personality questionnaires.