Skylines helps you understand how people solve problems

The purpose of the game “Cities: Skylines” is to make the best choices to help the city grow well. Even if it’s just a game, the challenges of running a city and the problems it presents help to understand how some people deal with these problems.

Thus, a group of researchers saw this feature of the game as a useful channel for measuring personality traits and the ability to solve complex problems.

This research was carried out by a team of researchers from the Department of Psychology in Austria and the Institute of Education in Germany. results Stady Posted in Frontiers in Psychology.

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In turn, the research analyzed nine different personality disorders: paranoid, schizophrenic, antisocial, borderline, hysterical, dependent, schizotypal, obsessive-compulsive and depressive.

The study included 242 adults (49% men) between the ages of 17 and 48. All subjects analyzed during the research were German speakers and patients of psychiatric and psychiatric hospitals.

The goal was to observe and understand how these people with “extreme” personality traits deal with complex issues within Cities: Skylines. In addition, they wanted to know how these personality traits affect their ability to deal with these challenges.

As some of the participants were not familiar with the game, prior to the survey they were given brief instructions to find out the main focus of the game and the main resources available. To measure the participants’ success, growth in the city’s population was assessed.

Challenges and outcomes of the “Cities: Skylines” initiative

As the mayor of the city, the main challenge in “Cities: Skylines” is for the player to manage the city and make it grow, all while keeping in mind a limited budget. Based on the fact that success in the game was dependent on the number of residents at the end, the researchers came to the following conclusions:

• Participants with more pronounced schizotypal, histrionic, and depressive personality traits had greater difficulty solving in-game problems;
• Participants with more distinctly dependent paranoia personality traits performed better than the previous group, but this association was weaker; that it
• Participants with schizophrenia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and antisocial traits did not succeed in the game.

According to the researchers, using “Cities: Skylines” as an analytical feature appears to measure problem-solving ability better than traditional quizzes.

However, they still need to consider the limitations of the method. Because the game still has a unique strategy to determine the success of the players. So different troubleshooting tasks may not give the same results.