Grouches, Extraverts, and Jellyfish: Assessment Validity and Game Mechanics in a Gamified Assessment

This study examines whether a personality inventory can be gamified without compromising its psychometric integrity. Using the 60-item HEXACO personality inventory as a benchmark, the authors compared traditional online survey responses with responses collected inside "Bubble Trip," a custom game that presented the same items under one of three mechanic conditions: a full game featuring enemies and point collection, an environmental-effects-only version, and a questions-only control. The sample consisted of 212 college-aged participants, predominantly between 18 and 21 years old and 55 percent female, distributed fairly evenly across conditions.

The central finding is that gamified administration yielded personality scores and internal reliability estimates (Cronbach's alphas) comparable to the traditional survey. Mean scores did not differ significantly across conditions, and the rates of careless responding were low, with 17 flagged respondents in the game and 10 in the survey. Engagement, however, was meaningfully higher in the full game condition, which showed significantly more bubbles collected, more changes to item responses, and slightly longer play time, averaging 5.5 minutes compared with 4.9 to 5.1 minutes in the other conditions. Several scale-level correlations between in-game behavior and personality scores emerged, though the authors treat these as exploratory rather than confirmatory.

The conclusion drawn is that the full game format increased participant engagement while preserving assessment validity, and that enemies and point collection did not interfere with Likert-scale responding. The authors nonetheless characterize these results as preliminary. Their call for replication spans other assessments, game themes, mechanics, and populations, as well as deeper investigation of behavioral indicators such as time spent on each item and in-game position.