Personalitycraft
Purpose
If someone took a personality test at some point in their life, chances are it was a variant of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). These type-tests give a simple letter combination and personality type categorisation that is intuitive and appealing, but not in line with the scientific consensus within personality psychology. Our project aims to spread awareness of personality psychological principles through fun and games.
We want to disseminate a few key personality psychological insights:
Personality is operationalised as a set of traits, which are continuous dimensions expressing relatively consistent tendencies to think, feel and act. You are not either an extravert or an introvert, instead people are extraverted to various degrees. Someone with a high score on extraversion would more often tend to speak at larger gatherings, for instance.
People act and interpret events differently due to their personality. This is a common source of interpersonal misunderstandings. When Alice offers Bob to participate in an exciting and novel experience that she enjoys, she could get hurt when he declines. She would benefit from knowing that Bob scores low on Openness to new experiences, and that for him it could be uncomfortable to participate. Maybe he would even disapprove of Alice for suggesting it in the first place. If Alice and Bob were more aware of their differences, they might show more understanding of each other’s preferences and behaviours.
Finally, we want to give players a vocabulary to discuss personality. The Five Factor Model (FFM) is the most parsimonious model of personality — yet. By grounding our game in the FFM, we hope to spread awareness of the components of personality as put forth by this model.
Project members
We are:
Håvard Karlsen & Ingvild Saksvik-Lehouillier, from the Department of Psychology, NTNU.
Jonas Langset Hustad & Gunnar Örn Thordarson, from the Section for teaching, learning and digital services, NTNU.
As of 2025 we also have gotten a student assistant: Amund Stalleland.
Funding
We received 150 000 NOK in funding through the Faculty of Faculty of Social and Educational Sciences in 2024 (2024/9477/KHOLE). The funding will go to developing, testing and producing a playable board game.
Timeline
We received the funding in May of 2024, and the project runs until October 2025.
What is the status of the project?
As of May 2025 we have create the basic rules and setting of the game. We’ve also put together a mock-up of the game until we get the final designs finished and can print the game. Meanwhile, we are still holding gameplay tests and tweaking the game.
In the game you play as a leader of a company that must hire employees to be work on projects. Completing projects nets you points which are needed to win the game. The player gets a personality profile with each of the five traits scoring either low, medium or high. This traits affects the actions the player can perform in the game, like how easily they can get new cards. The employees have their own dispositions which impact the game. A lazy engineer have to rest for a turn after finishing their projects, while a creative accountant allows the player to draw a card when hired.
A player can also play interventions on themselves or others: These can have beneficial or detrimental effects (or a combination). A spontaneous meeting will result in a project taking longer to finish, while a job announcement allows the player to draw more cards.
Læringsfestivalen 2025
We presented our game at NTNU’s Læringsfestivalen (the festival of learning) in May of 2025. In addition to our presentation of the game and our work process, we had a table in the main hall where anyone who was interested could come and try the game. And lots of people did!
Check out this montage of our time at Læringsfestivalen: