How player and opponent personalities influence cooperative gameplay

Abstract

Research has shown that digital game players often feel engagement and rapport with a game hero or character when they can channel their own ambitions and goals through the hero's journey in the game world; in essence, they feel a sense of accomplishment and fulfilment whenever they put the game mechanics to use to help the hero reach a positive ending to the game quests. In the case of cooperative gameplay, rapport also has to do with their perception of their peers' skills, gameplay style and behaviour within the game. In this paper, we describe an experiment to identify whether matching players with different personalities, as characterized by the OCEAN or Big-5 personality model, can influence their player experience with a custom-made, cooperative game.