How Cities: Skylines is Helping Psychologists Understand Complex Personality Disorders
Scientists turned to the big city management game Cities: Skylines to uncover the relationship between personality traits and complex problem-solving.
As part of the investigation, Cypostresearchers asked a pool of 242 volunteers with personality disorders such as schizophrenia, histrionics, and addictions to play Cities: Skylines to see how these traits affected their performance in a management simulation. I have asked you to confirm whether
Paradox’s Interactive Cities: Skylines primary goal is to steadily grow settlements from small towns to thriving megatropolises. This is only possible by making sure your city has the correct blend of commercial, industrial and residential areas, all of which must be connected by a road network.
On top of that, we need to balance our finances and ensure access to critical resources and services such as electricity, clean water, waste management and public transportation, while also paying attention to the myriad needs of our urban population. .
Assuming you can successfully turn all these plates at once, more and more people will flock to your city, adapting and rebuilding your infrastructure on the fly to meet the needs of your ever-growing population. forced to invent.
However, mistakes in planning can lead to a series of problems that leave your city prey to rampant crime and widespread devastation, including high-rise apartment buildings on fire and entire industrial districts left abandoned. If you’re really bad at games (like me), entire sections of the once-proud city are little more than sparsely populated husks that Batman himself won’t try to set right with his 10-foot Batarang.
This is a complex digital playground that researchers have used to explore which personality traits are most strongly associated with a person’s ability to solve complex problems. Each research participant was given an introduction to the game and was presented with an identical digital city of 2,600 residents with a currency of 50,000 and a satisfaction rate of 90%.
You were then given 120 minutes to grow the city to a population of 5,000 while maintaining at least 75% satisfaction and a positive bank balance. If the population falls below her 1,000, time passes, or the city is in debt, the volunteer will fail the job.
Researchers found that participants who expressed more schizophrenia, depression, and histrionic personality traits performed poorly on the task compared to other participants. Dependent and paranoid traits also appeared to adversely affect task performance, albeit to a lesser extent.
But the findings weren’t cut and dry. The study also found that individuals who exhibit “higher levels of typically negative personality traits” may still thrive if they have higher levels of resilience, action orientation, and creative motivation. is also mentioned.
Psypost points out that while the study helps provide a data link between personality traits and complex problem-solving abilities, it’s not without its drawbacks. For one thing, the management sim’s previous player experiences aren’t fully accounted for. Also, only test problem-solving for one game, rather than a wider variety of tasks.
The full paper is available online Via the journal Frontiers of Psychology.
IGN gave Cities Skylines an 8.5/10 at launch, describing it as an “impressive and often beautiful simulation” “about the simple pleasures of building”. Paradox has since ported the management to PlayStation VR2 and is currently working on a sequel due out later this year on current generation consoles and PC.
Anthony is a freelance contributor covering science and video game news for IGN. With his 8+ years of experience covering the latest developments in multiple scientific fields, he has absolutely no time for cheating. Follow him on Twitter @BeardConGamer
