Everyone who went to university will probably remember their final projects as a time of great stress and a lot of book reading, in a fierce attempt to prove what dissertation you have presented a few months before. It seems we might be studying Animal Crossing, like the final year student in Psychology, Sam Davern, doing his final study on the psychology of Animal Crossing: New Horizons players. It’s 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 how he can figure it out, by entering your different Nook Miles achievements and then doing a quick personality. test. Maybe you like people more than art, so you have a lot of Nook Miles achievements to do with visiting other islands or making friends with your villagers? I think we will not know until the survey is done.
At the end of the survey you will get a detailed report on your personality and type of player, which can give you useful insights into how you deal with the world and with games.
This is, of course, a totally anonymous survey, and it’s even been approved by the UCC Ethics Committee, so you do not have to worry about how you can haunt statistics in the game again. However, Sam points out that “very little game psychology research has been done beyond the ordinary”, video games make people more violent “and there has been basically no research done on social simulation games,” so if the study gets a lot of participants, it could quite possibly make a scientific journal. Exciting!
The survey is currently available at animalcrossingsurvey.com, and anyone interested can also sign up at the end to enter a draw for a Switch game of their choice.