Role play choices an indicator of personality traits

The world of Dungeons and Dragons is where the energies of Wilson’s Hospital students Ciara Boylan (fourth year) and Vaughan Sheahan (sixth year) were focused, as they attempted to devise a way of classifying personality based on character choices.

For their project, Role Playing Game (RPG) players were asked to fill out personality surveys: "We theorise that there may be a correlation between a person’s hobbies and self-image," says Vaughan, an aspiring psychiatrist, explaining that out of that, they attempted to discover what character class they enjoyed in role playing games.

Fascinatingly, those who chose ‘Rogue’ roles were often people who in real life, were likely to identify as anxious persons. The outcome of Ciara and Vaughan’s work is a quiz that helps players identify the role they would probably most enjoy playing.

The two both play Dungeons and Dragons through a club at their school, and, says Ciara, a finding that surprised them was that game-playing survey respondents who would in real life consider themselves religious were almost never interested in assuming any of the game roles perceived as being those of characters with a religious inclination.

Apart from the processes of research and analysis, Vaughan enjoyed the discovery that he was good at communicating his ideas to people – a noticeable trait in Ciara’s case also.