I conduct a brief, informal survey on members of the competitive Super Smash Brothers Melee community in order to test the hypothesis that there is a correlation between personality and playstyle or character selection. 1754 (!) players took the survey (45 excluded, 22 skipped personality questionnaire, n=1689), which included the Big-Five Inventory (BFI) alongside items screening for which characters they frequently play, their self-assessment of their playstyle, etc. I find no relationship between personality and character selection and a strong correlation between playstyle questions and personality.

Super Smash Brothers Melee (henceforth SSBM) is a 2001 video game with a tournament scene that survives vibrantly to this day, despite multiple sequels to the game being released. Part of why the sequels have failed to displace this community like sequels for other "esports" typically do¹ is that SSBM provides the player a much wider repertoire of options² in any given scenario, making the gameplay disparate from the other entries in the series³.

Since the game affords the player so many options in virtually every situation, there has been much conjecture within the community about why specific players select specific options, and why each player's emergent "playstyle" is so distinct from everybody else's. One very common hypothesis is that playstyle is correlated with personality; players with more aggressive personalities play more aggressively, players who have more passive personalities play more passively, etc. The validity of this hypothesis is extremely highly contested:

Your playstyle literally IS your personality. It is how you react to certain stimuli or situations. People thinking that this isn't true deeply hurts me T_T. If you don't believe this, what do you think gameplay even is?

— Fiction (@FictionIRL) November 9, 2018

*uthrow chaingrabs Fox on FD*

haha im such a Scorpio https://t.co/lxS5B3UT8t

— CONEY (@coneyzz) November 9, 2018

Furthermore, there is some support in the literature for novel variables correlating with personality. For example, book preferences have been shown to correlate with personality⁴ and even influence it⁵, and this relationship was shown by Annalyn et al to extend to extremely niche subgenres (i.e. Extraversion being negatively correlated with preference for reading Manga⁶). Based upon this, it is not so outlandish to suggest that people with specific psychological profiles would be attracted to specific characters or playstyles.

Personality within the realm of sports and non-esport video games has been studied as well, which while not directly analogous to esports can be used as a comparison point. Nikbakhsh et al demonstrated a relationship between sport performance and high conscientiousness⁷, which could suggest the possibility that stronger esports competitors could have higher scores for this factor. On the opposite end, Bean et al surveyed a large number of World of Warcraft players and found correlations between "Play Style" (i.e. preference for Player vs Player, Player vs Environment, or Roleplaying) and Extraversion, Conscientiousness, and Neuroticism; although they found no relationship between personality and the player's race or class⁸.

To assess this, I created a short survey which administered a personality test using The Big Five Inventory (BFI), a brief self-report inventory from Oliver John's Berkeley Personality Lab to measure the Big Five dimensions⁹. Alongside this personality test, the survey collected a number of novel SSBM-related information about the player such as their preferred character, their attitude towards projectiles, their preference for moving forwards, and so forth. This survey was then posted to various social media platforms, with most responders coming either from twitter¹⁰ or Reddit¹¹

To briefly review the Big Five personality model, there are five factors which describe an individual's personality - Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism (together frequently abbreviated "OCEAN").

Openness describes the desire for intellectual stimulation and comfort with new ideas.

Conscientiousness describes a preference for planning over spontaneity and an orientation towards achievement / self-discipline.

Extraversion describes enjoyment of social activities and generally higher levels of arousal.

Agreeableness describes traits like optimism and empathy.

Neuroticism describes a lack of emotional stability and an orientation towards feeling moody or depressed.

I hypothesize that we may see a small correlation between self-reported playstyle questions and personality; more specifically that identifying as a more intuitive player would align with lower conscientiousness than a player identifying as a more theory-oriented one.

The survey questions can be found here¹². Before we look at individual subsamples, it's interesting to see how respondents answered as a single group.

With regards to personality, SSBM Players (avg age 21) overall score significantly lower on all personality metrics except agreeableness compared to other 21-year olds¹³ (n=1689, p=0.78 for agreeableness, p<0.0001 for everything else). This contrasts with Bean et al, which demonstrated mostly average mean scores among World of Warcraft players compared to BFI norms for all factors (except for Neuroticism, which was lower as it was for SSBM players).¹⁴ Worth exploring later is the relationship between Extraversion and desire for competition, which was claimed to correlate by Nick Yee in a 2016 blog post surveying n=140,000 gamers¹⁵.

Most people rated themselves as having above average technical skill (i.e. ability to input difficult or precise inputs) compared to their peers. This highlights a weakness of relying on self-reports to quantify qualities of a player's gameplay - the better-than-average effect¹⁶. This cognitive bias (also known as illusory superiority) is one of the most robust in the literature, and refers to the tendency of people to overestimate their own qualities and abilities relative to their peers. A similar study in this vein can be found in Cross 1977, in which the faculty at University of Nebraska-Lincoln were surveyed and 68% rated themselves in the top 25% for teaching ability, with more than 90% rating themselves as above average. The effect on self-judgment of technical mastery is much less striking, but illustrates the same concept - we will need to proceed with caution when evaluating self-reports of this type.

To assess the relationship between personality and character selection, we can perform an analysis of variance (ANOVA) in which certain participants belong to multiple groups (i.e. Fox/Falco players are factored into the means for Fox players and Falco players).

Performing ANOVA with character selection and personality traits, we can see the striking lack of an effect the variable has on personality by itself. Shown in the figure above is Conscientiousness among five very common characters, but the lack of effect extends to all characters across all factors (p = .21, .09, 0.25, 0.16, and 0.73 for Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism, respectively).

However, something striking about this data is that it's somewhat different from the character representation data collected in Making Sense of Melee ¹⁷.

The data collected from the survey contains a much higher density of Falco players, as well as generally representing low and mid tier players much higher than data collected from actual sets on smash.gg (n=22,000). Ganondorf is a particularly unusual one, being represented by only 9 players across 22,000 sets but being more popular than Ice Climbers by survey self-identification. One possible explanation for this distribution is that some participants in the survey do not attend tournaments, and that a possible correlation between character selection and personality only extends to more active competitors.

Performing this filtering step upon players who claim to be active competitors at locals reduces our sample size to 1029 and yields the following character distribution…

Which resembles the tournament distribution a bit more. That said, rerunning the ANOVA with this shortened list also does not yield any significant difference in personality between characters, nor does it yield any significant difference if you limit it to ranked players (p>0.25 for all factors). It seems that there is no strong relationship between character choice and personality, which mirrors what was found in Bean & Groth-Marnat 2014.

Examining the relationship between personality and responses on the playstyle questions is much more straightforward, since those questions were limited to one response. Because there are so many relationships (each question against 5 personality factors), a stricter value than p=0.05 is necessary since otherwise you will arrive at a "significant" relationship by chance every 4 questions¹⁸.

A useful starting point is examining the relationship between activity level and Extraversion. You might expect there to be a meaningfully increased level of Extraversion among more active players, and in fact not only is there such a relationship (p < 0.00001), it's a frighteningly linear one; the least extraverted groups were the ones who either did not attend events or only attended smaller ones (mean: 2.73, std: 0.8) whereas the extremely active players were also the most extraverted (mean: 3.30, std: 0.9).

Based upon this, it becomes more reasonable that the strongest predictor of skill level ended up being Extraversion (p < 0.0005), unlike traditional sports which are most strongly predicted by Conscientiousness¹⁹. On a macro scale, this makes some sense - you need to attend a lot of events to be ranked, and generally speaking the fastest way to improve at the game is to play it with other people, usually in offline environments²⁰. Extraversion helps corner both of these niches, both as a way to meet activity requirements and as a way to more frequently obtain useful practice partners.

Another amusing relationship comes from the question asking players whether they considered their playstyle defensive or aggressive. The results were a bit more mixed here, but players who rated themselves very defensive scored lower on Agreeableness (mean: 2.28, p=0.009) compared to players who rated themselves in the middle, or as very aggressive (mean: ~3.66). Interestingly, players who scored themselves at an extreme for this question (1 or 5, 1 being "Very Defensive" and 5 being "Very Aggressive") scored higher in Extraversion (means: 2.90, 3.05 for 1 and 5, p=0.0007) than players who scored themselves somewhere in between (mean: 2.76).

As you might have expected, players who rated themselves as highly intuition-driven players scored lower on Conscientiousness compared to players who considered themselves more knowledge-oriented (p < 0.0001). This is fairly straightforward, and supports our original hypothesis.

The technical skill question ended up as a surprisingly significant vector for personality, correlating rather strongly with higher Openness (p<0.0001), Conscientiousness (p = 0.003), and Extraversion (p<0.0001), as well as low ratings correlating with higher Neuroticism (p=0.004). A good amount of this is likely due to the phrasing (i.e. using the word "confidence") paired alongside the aforementioned better-than-average effect, but it is fairly interesting nonetheless.

Finally, Players who considered it important for their playstyle to be considered "cool" by their peers scored higher in Openness (p<0.0001), Extraversion (p<0.0001), and Agreeableness (p=0.0005). Players who considered it very important for their playstyles to be considered "Honest" (i.e. built around cleanly outplaying) scored very slightly higher on Openness but mostly the same across other personality factors.

Moreso than initially hypothesized, there seems to be a strong correlation between certain self-identified playstyle questions and personality. Thanks in part due to our fairly large sample size, we can be reasonably confident that most of these are not due to random fluctuations in the data, although for the most part the effect sizes are quite small.

There are a number of considerations worth mentioning as possible confounds or sources for error:

There seems to be a significant relationship between playstyle in Super Smash Brothers and personality. Despite the relative informality of the survey, the large sample and effect sizes open the door for further, ideally more formal research between novel gaming variables and personality or perception. SSBM may perhaps be a sub-ideal vehicle for future research, as its lack of readily accessible in-game statistics make it difficult to obtain playstyle information that doesn't rely on self-reporting (although this may change with the release of Jas Laferriere's Project Slippi ²⁶).

Nonetheless, the flowery language surrounding competition and esports as a means of self-expression may have a grain of truth to them. Esports players remain a highly interesting subpopulation worth scientific exploration, with personality now added as a meaningfully different vector alongside temporal²⁷ and visual²⁸ perception. More research would be worthwhile.

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