How Cities: Skylines is Helping Psychologists Understand Complex Personality Disorders
Scientists have turned to the metropolitan managment game Cities: Skylines to shed light on the relationship between personality traits and complex problem solving.
As part of the study, spotted by Psypost, the researchers asked a pool of 242 volunteers with personality disorders such as schizotypal, histrionic, and dependent to play Cities: Skylines to see how these traits affected their performance at the management sim.
The overriding goal of Paradox’s Interactive’s Cities: Skylines is to steadily grow your settlement from a small town into a thriving megatropolis. This can only be done by ensuring that your city has the correct blend of commercial, industrial, and residential districts, all of which must be connected by a network of roads.
On top of that you’ll need to balance finances, and ensure access to essential resources and services like electricity, clean water, garbage disposal, and public transport, while also paying heed to the myriad needs of the city’s population.
Assuming that you can successfully spin all those plates at once, more and more people will flock to your city, forcing you to adapt and reinvent the infrastructure on the fly to cope with the needs of the ever increasing citizenry.
However, mistakes in planning can lead to a cascade of issues that will see your city fall prey to rampant criminality and widespread dilapidation, as high rise apartments catch fire, and entire industrial districts are left abandoned. If you’re really bad at the game (like me), then entire sections of your once proud city will be little more than a depopulated husk that Batman himself wouldn’t attempt to set right with a ten foot batarang.
This, is the complex digital playground that the researchers used to examine which personality traits were most strongly associated with a person’s complex problem solving capabilities. Each of the study participants were given an introduction to the game, and presented with an identical digital city of 2,600 residents with 50,000 in currency to spend and a satisfaction level of 90 percent.
They were then given 120 minutes to grow their cities to a population of 5,000 residents while keeping the satisfaction levels to at least 75 percent, and making sure that the bank balance remained positive. A volunteer would fail the task if the population dropped below 1,000, the time elapsed, or if the city fell into debt.
The researchers discovered that participants with higher expressions of schizotypal, depressive and histrionic personality traits performed poorly at the task compared to others. Dependent and paranoid traits also seemed to have a negative effect on task performance, albeit to a lesser extent.
However, the findings were not cut and dry. The study also notes that individuals exhibiting “high levels of usually negative personality traits” could still perform well if they had higher levels of resilience, action orientation, and a motivation for creation.
Psypost notes that the study, whilst useful in providing data links between personality traits and complex problem solving ability, is not without its flaws. For one it does not fully account for previous player experience of managment sims. It also only tests problem solving with a single game rather than a wider and more diverse range of tasks.
The full paper is available to view online via the journal Frontiers of Psychology.
IGN gave Cities Skylines an 8.5/10 at launch describing it as an “impressive and often beaufitul simulation” that is all “about the simple joy of building”. Paradox has since ported the management to the PlayStation VR2, and is currently working on a sequel, which is set to release on current gen consoles and PC later this year.
Anthony is a freelance contributor covering science and video gaming news for IGN. He has over eight years experience of covering breaking developments in multiple scientific fields and absolutely no time for your shenanigans. Follow him on Twitter @BeardConGamer
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