Super Smash Brothers Melee (henceforth SSBM) is a 2001 video game with a tournament scene that survives vibrantly to this day, despite multiple sequels to the game being released. Part of why the sequels have failed to displace this community like sequels for other "esports" typically do is that SSBM provides the player a much wider repertoire of options in any given scenario, making the gameplay disparate from the other entries in the series.

Since the game affords the player so many options in virtually every situation, there has been much conjecture within the community about why specific players select specific options, and why each player's emergent "playstyle" is so distinct from everybody else's. One very common hypothesis is that playstyle is correlated with personality; players with more aggressive personalities play more aggressively, players who have more passive personalities play more passively, etc. The validity of this hypothesis is extremely highly contested:

Your playstyle literally IS your personality. It is how you react to certain stimuli or situations. People thinking that this isn't true deeply hurts me T_T. If you don't believe this, what do you think gameplay even is? — Fiction (@FictionIRL) November 9, 2018

*uthrow chaingrabs Fox on FD*



haha im such a Scorpio https://t.co/lxS5B3UT8t — CONEY (@coneyzz) November 9, 2018

Furthermore, there is some support in the literature for novel variables correlating with personality. For example, book preferences have been shown to correlate with personality and even influence it, and this relationship was shown by Annalyn et al to extend to extremely niche subgenres (i.e. Extraversion being negatively correlated with preference for reading Manga). Based upon this, it is not so outlandish to suggest that people with specific psychological profiles would be attracted to specific characters or playstyles.

Personality within the realm of sports and non-esport video games has been studied as well, which while not directly analogous to esports can be used as a comparison point. Nikbakhsh et al demonstrated a relationship between sport performance and high conscientiousness, which could suggest the possibility that stronger esports competitors could have higher scores for this factor. On the opposite end, Bean et al surveyed a large number of World of Warcraft players and found correlations between "Play Style" (i.e. preference for Player vs Player, Player vs Environment, or Roleplaying) and Extraversion, Conscientiousness, and Neuroticism; although they found no relationship between personality and the player's race or class.

To assess this, I created a short survey which administered a personality test using The Big Five Inventory (BFI), a brief self-report inventory from Oliver John's Berkeley Personality Lab to measure the Big Five dimensions. Alongside this personality test, the survey collected a number of novel SSBM-related information about the player such as their preferred character, their attitude towards projectiles, their preference for moving forwards, and so forth. This survey was then posted to various social media platforms, with most responders coming either from twitter or Reddit

To briefly review the Big Five personality model, there are five factors which describe an individual's personality - Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism (together frequently abbreviated "OCEAN").

Openness describes the desire for intellectual stimulation and comfort with new ideas.

Conscientiousness describes a preference for planning over spontaneity and an orientation towards achievement / self-discipline.

Extraversion describes enjoyment of social activities and generally higher levels of arousal.

Agreeableness describes traits like optimism and empathy.

Neuroticism describes a lack of emotional stability and an orientation towards feeling moody or depressed.

I hypothesize that we may see a small correlation between self-reported playstyle questions and personality; more specifically that identifying as a more intuitive player would align with lower conscientiousness than a player identifying as a more theory-oriented one.