Anyone who has gone to college is likely to remember your final projects as a period of great stress and a lot of reading books, in a frantic attempt to prove any thesis you presented several months earlier. It turns out that we could be studying Animal Crossing, like senior psychology student Sam Davern, who is doing his final study on the psychology of Animal Crossing: New Horizons players. Is that you!
Specifically, Sam wants to know if there is a correlation between the players’ behavior in the game and their personality types, and the way he is discovering this is to put you on your various Nook Miles achievements and then do a quick test personality . Maybe you like people more than art, so do you have a lot of Nook Miles achievements to make when visiting other islands or making friends with your villagers? I don’t think we will know until the research is completed.
At the end of the survey, you will get a detailed report on your personality and type of player, which can give you some useful tips on how you interact with the world and games.
It’s a completely anonymous survey, of course, and has even been approved by the UCC ethics committee, so there’s no need to worry about how your in-game statistics can come back to haunt you. However, Sam points out that “there has been very little research in unusual game psychology” video games make people more violent “and basically there has been no research on social simulation games”, so if the study takes many participants, it can very well get to a scientific journal. Exciting!
The survey is now live on animalcrossingsurvey.com, and anyone interested can also choose to enter the draw for a Switch game of their choice at the end.