Personalitycraft

An innovative project to design a board game that teaches sound personality psychological principles — while also being fun and enjoyable for people without a background in psychology.
Author

Håvard R. Karlsen

Purpose

If someone took a personality test at some point in their life, chances are it was a variant of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). These type-tests give a simple letter combination and personality type categorisation that is intuitive and appealing, but not in line with the scientific consensus within personality psychology. Our project aims to spread awareness of personality psychological principles through fun and games.

We want to disseminate a few key personality psychological insights:

  • Personality is operationalised as a set of traits, which are continuous dimensions expressing relatively consistent tendencies to think, feel and act. You are not either an extravert or an introvert, instead people are extraverted to various degrees. Someone with a high score on extraversion would more often tend to speak at larger gatherings, for instance.

  • People act and interpret events differently due to their personality. This is a common source of interpersonal misunderstandings. When Alice offers Bob to participate in an exciting and novel experience that she enjoys, she could get hurt when he declines. She would benefit from knowing that Bob scores low on Openness to new experiences, and that for him it could be uncomfortable to participate. Maybe he would even disapprove of Alice for suggesting it in the first place. If Alice and Bob were more aware of their differences, they might show more understanding of each other’s preferences and behaviours.

Finally, we want to give players a vocabulary to discuss personality. The Five Factor Model (FFM) is the most parsimonious model of personality — yet. By grounding our game in the FFM, we hope to spread awareness of the components of personality as put forth by this model.

Project members

We are:

  • Håvard Karlsen & Ingvild Saksvik-Lehouillier, from the Department of Psychology, NTNU

  • Jonas Langset Hustad & Gunnar Örn Thordarson, from the Section for teaching, learning and digital services, NTNU

Håvard Karlsen Ingvild Saksvik-Lehouillier Jonas Langset Hustad Gunnar Örn Thordarson

Funding

We received 150 000 NOK in funding through the Faculty of Faculty of Social and Educational Sciences in 2024 (2024/9477/KHOLE). The funding will go to developing, testing and producing a playable board game.

Timeline

We received the funding in May of 2024, and the project runs until October 2025.

How does the board game look?

That is what we’re currently prototyping and developing! Check back later and we will keep you posted.