"The personalities of miniature wargame players" Topic

"Robert Körner, Jana Kammerhoff, and Astrid Schütz (Otto-Friedrich-University of Bamberg) have just published a fascinating article in the Journal of Individual Differences (2020) entitled "Who Commands the Little Soldiers? A Comparison of the Personality Traits of Miniature Wargame Players With Other Gamers and Non-Gamers." The article is pay-walled, so you will need an individual or institutional subscription to access the full text.

The popularity of miniature wargames (MWGs) has recently been on the rise. We aimed to identify the personality characteristics of people who play MWGs. Whereas the popular media have suspected that fantasy role-playing and war-related games cause antisocial behavior, past research on tabletop role-playing has shown that gamers are creative and empathetic individuals. Previous studies have investigated pen-and-paper tabletop games, which require imagination and cooperation between players. Tabletop MWGs are somewhat different because players compete against each other, and there is a strong focus on war-related actions. Thus, people have voiced the suspicion that players of this type of game may be rather aggressive. In the present study, 250 male MWG players completed questionnaires on the Big Five, authoritarianism, risk-orientation, and motives as well as an intelligence test. The same measures were administered to non-gamers, tabletop role-playing gamers, and first-person shooter gamers…"
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Amicalement
Armand

Interesting, but statements such as "Only people who perceive these complex and sociable games that require strategic thinking as a pleasant pastime will be attracted by these games." are surely just common sense – people play the sort of games they enjoy – that hardly requires academic research!

The "Journal of Individual Differences" ??

Seems an amazingly narrow topic for a journal.

You would be amazed by i) how far an academic can advance simply by re-stating the obvious in an articulate fashion and ii) just how stunningly arcane academic journals can be

(smile)

Amicalement
Armand

Gotta agree with Arthur1815 all that text just to say that people who play wargames do so because they enjoy it…WOW!!!
And Frederick, are you or were you once one of those self same academics. It's OK if you are or were I'm not judging, after all, I married one, and frequently do so myself. I am often called upon to restate the obvious in another way, usually using a great deal of technical jargon, to accommodate a specific audience or agenda.

Glup!.

Amicalement
Armand