The Influence of Personality Traits and Game Design Elements on Player Enjoyment: An Empirical Study on GWAPs for Linguistics

Abstract

The present research investigates the effects of personality traits (PTs) and game design elements (GDEs) on player enjoyment (PE) in the context of serious games. Three Games With A Purpose (GWAPs) were created to revise and correct automatically tagged parts-of-speech (PoS) of the Corpus Oral y Sonoro del Español Rural (COSER, [5], 'Audible Corpus of Spoken Rural Spanish'), the most extensive collection of Spanish oral dialectal data. The ultimate goal of the project is to build a morpho-syntactically annotated and parsed corpus of the European Spanish dialects through a crowd-sourced gaming environment, whereby players assign a PoS, i.e., a grammatical category (e.g., verb, noun, adjective, pronoun), to a word in an input text thereby confirming or correcting the automatically tagged PoS. This task has been implemented in three GWAPs: Agentes, Tesoros, and Anotatlón. Each game concept includes a set of GDEs (e.g., rewards, challenges, leaderboards, among others) to investigate their influence on PE. This study, which includes 54 participants, shows associations between PTs and GDEs. However, only two GDEs, theme and levels, are related to both PTs and PE. These findings hold the potential to inspire future research and guide the design of future serious games.