Research Paper on DBD: Results - Summary
Hello everybody,
a few months ago, I started working on my bachelor's thesis in Psychology on personality traits and their influence on role preferences in Dead by Daylight. Attached you will find a brief & broad (!) summary of the most important findings. The theoretical framework, discussion of the results and the study's limitations are more than several pages long, which is why they are not included here.
I tried to make the summary as clear and comprehensible as possible.
(the last page contains a message for everybody who participated)
Have a good rest of your day!
Nathalie
Comments
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This is really interesting read!
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If I remember correctly @Almo was very interested in the results of this.
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Very interesting read! I was curious, was the 4v1 nature of the game a factor in your analysis (I didn't see it mentioned in the summary)? Purely by nature of the game requiring 1/4 the number of killers vs survivors, would that modify the predictability of any individual choosing survivor or killer?
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First and foremost congrats on graduating!
And that's an interesting summary as well. It's interesting in its own way when a lot of predictions turn out to not be correct, something to learn from it regardless afterall. Thanks for sharing 🙂
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Oh dang. This is actually legit.
Cool.
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Yes, thanks for the ping!
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Hello Almo! Should there be any interest: I could forward the entire paper to You via e-mail.
Kind regards,
Nathalie
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Hey oxygen,
absolutely! I did not expect these findings, but this highlights the complexity of video game research; we should be cautious with gaming stereotypes. Unfortunately the discussion is quite extensive (and cannot be translated into pie charts), which is why I chose to leave it out in the interest of brevity. Apologies!
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The demogorgon's on the slides brings me joy
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The little Demo head in the corners. Loved it. Congrats on graduating!
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Dang. Women out here murdering people 😂
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Interesting summary. So about 2/3 of females prefer killer and 2/3 of males prefer survivor. Also about 4/5 of the respondents were male versus 1/5 female. I wonder if the two are correlated in the sense that because there are far fewer female players the ones that exist tend to prefer the solo experience of killer over playing with friends as survivor? In other words are players in general more comfortable playing solo if they have fewer people they associate with outside the game and the male and female players tend to prefer to associate with similar genders, leading to the smaller gender group gravitating more toward the solo experience?
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Congrats on your thesis. It's very well written.
I like that your findings show that as a killer main I'm likely to be introverted, disagreeable, and neurotic. I find your results to be... accurate.
You got me.
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Thank you very much! Yeah, I will now start trying to sneek him into other presentations at uni ...!
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Yeah that would be cool :) PM me in the DbD discord. https://discord.gg/pPUqeT
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Oh yeah I can imagine and totally understand keeping it brief. Your summary did a good job of pointing out some surprising findings while keeping it "accessible", and that in itself gives people something to think about and discuss if they desire 👍️
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Excuse my newbie-ness, but I don't know how to navigate in there; I can't find You - would need some additional help here.
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Very nice, I'm not sure there were enough demo pics though
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Amazing job with graduating!! This is all really, really cool, and I loved the amount of demo too! Ain't a psychology student (filthy Law, Economics, and RS a-level scrub rn) but that's really, really sick! Congrats.
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As a fellow researcher (albeit in a completely different field that has nothing to do with Psychology), have a vote up and let me wish you a successful career.
I will be looking for the complete paper and give it a read. Congratulations!
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Interesting. I'm a bit surprised that guys are much more likely to play Survivor. I wonder if that has something to do with the queue times I've noticed where the mornings/afternoons have too many killers and evenings have too many survivors.
Also <3 the Demo pics.
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Can't wait to read this
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Fellow psych major, that's really interesting! It makes me wonder if the way we conceive of the difference between killer and survivor roles is wrong -- because I also would have predicted that low agreeableness and high neuroticism would map onto killer more readily (I say, as a person who was a killer main for the first year I played), but it seems about even.
I'd be interested to see some of the other studies you mentioned, looking at personality traits and in-game preferences, if you want to post the refs. Either way, this was a really cool project.
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As a survivor main, I would have predicted the exact opposite - low agreeableness would make you more likely to be a survivor.
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This was a fun read. It would have been nicer if there was a larger sample size of women to draw from, but the results are still interesting.
What conclusions can we draw from this? If I had to take a guess I would say that perhaps a solo experience as killer is more appealing to women, whom are used to teammates treating them poorly due to their gender in other games? a shot in the dark I know since this game doesn't have voice chat natively but its something to think about.
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This was interesting
Thanks you for posting the results
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It's funny, I was reading the hypothesis and as you were describing a Killer Main, I was like: "Gee, this doesn't sound like me at all..."
The findings made me feel better. :D
Very interesting paper.
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LMAO killers are more altruistic than survivors.
This is so true. So many times I play killer I straight up feel bad for SOMEONE and give them hatch or something. I never pity another survivor as survivor though, unless they were seriously bullied and/or a baby.
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While I was reading your hypothesis I was like has she really played this game? Lmao. Congrats on graduating !
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Haha thanks, Karu! Best of luck on your exams, then!
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Hey dirge,
thanks! what's your field of research? I'm curious!
I doubt you'll be able to find the paper, as it only exists on my and my professor's computer at the moment. I have a short meeting with him today, however, and if you're interested in having a read, I'll come back to you.
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Hey fox,
it's exactly the same when I'm playing killer; I somehow cannot do my job properly and start messing around with everyone. Especially when someone gets farmed off the hook or intentionally sandbagged, my inner 'mom' activates!
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Thank you, Corian!
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Hey Excel,
Yes, most definitely. That's a very interesting thought!
The conclusions are all in the discussion chapter - should you be interested in having a more thorough read, I will have to come back to you since there's something I need to clarify first.
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Hey fellow psych major,
that is definitely something to ponder on. Since they take over several pages, I can send you the references (or in some cases the entire pdf file) via e-mail - if you're interested. There's some really interesting work on e.g. Overwatch by Greitemeyer & Delhove as well as Nick Yee (Daedalus Project, Quantic Foundry). But I'd be happy to discuss all of this further with you via e-mail if you'd like!
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I think this is an important distinction. In my experience, which I know in terms of statistics is just conjecture, males have more friends that play games and would be more likely to play a game of this type. With that being said, if you have more friends that play this game then you are more likely to play together and if you do so you are forced to play survivor. So more groups are going to prefer survivor because that is what they are better at or have more practice doing, or simply don't play as much solo. Simply looking at only one factor in the regression isn't enough because it can form a bias to that one factor. I would bet that if a few dummy variables were used to bring more factors into the game such as 1= prefers to play solo or 0=prefers to play in group another being 1=has 1 or 2 friends with the game or 0=has 3+ friends with the game that we may see less bias on the gender variable.
Essentially the more variables you use the more accurate the model. If you use only one then it either has no correlation at all or it is super correlated most of the time. When I was earning my Econ Master's I did a study that was looking at gun violence. If I formed a regression that looked at total homicide (just simply someone dying) as the dependent, and used murder as the independent variable it would show that murder was a huge factor. But if you start throwing in other independent variables such as earned income, education, family make up etc. I know this looked at education, but the other variables seemed to all be in game choices which people may have been indifferent about and made decisions in answering based on anything. This game being different than an mmorpg where personality is more important due to picking a character and basically becoming that character and playing a particular role where essentially in this game every character is the same provided the same perk availability across the board and everyone needs to due the same few tasks.
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I am a Master in Information Technology currently working for a PhD. My research is focused in the Security and Communications field.
I'd love to read it, but I wouldn't mind waiting until it is published. I can read the summary you provided here in the meantime.
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