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Oceanic

Created at the University of Advancing Technology in Phoenix, AZ
February 2019 - May 2019
RPGMaker Game, Research Project
Solo Project

Oceanic is an RPG-Maker Game that was created as part of my capstone research project at the end of high school. The game uses a variable system and about 40 different in-game decisions to create a basic psychological evaluation of the player by the time they have finished the game.

For my capstone research project, we were tasked with answering a research question of our own design. I chose to study video game psychology, due to its prevalence in the media at the time. I began by studying the "Big Five" model of psychology, which measures participants based on five qualities: Openness, Contentiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism.  I then created an interactive narrative that presented the player with many choices of varying degrees of importance, such as choosing how to respond to being approached by a young fan of your heroics, or whether to kill the villain at the end of the game. I used an in-game system to log the player's decisions in the game and output a personality score upon completion. 

After playing the game, players were asked to take an online personality test that also used the Big Five model. By comparing the results of the two tests, I was able to determine how playing a video game changed the decisions made by the people playing.

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