ACNH Thought Bubble
Image: CBR/Nintendo

Anyone who's been to university will probably remember their final projects as a time of huge stress and lots of book-reading, in a frantic attempt to prove whatever thesis you pitched several months beforehand. Turns out, we could have been studying Animal Crossing, like final-year Psychology student Sam Davern, who is doing his final study on the psychology of Animal Crossing: New Horizons players. That's you!

Specifically, Sam wants to know if there is a correlation between the behaviour of the players in-game and their personality types, and the way he's figuring that out is by having you put in your various Nook Miles achievements, and then doing a quick personality test. Maybe you're more into people than art, so do you have lots of Nook Miles achievements to do with visiting other islands, or befriending your villagers? I guess we won't know until the survey is done.

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Personality test
Time to find out if we're secretly psychopaths! — Image: Sam Davern

At the end of the survey, you'll get a detailed report on your personality and player type, which may give you some useful insights into how you interact with the world and with games.

It's a totally anonymous survey, of course, and it's even been approved by the UCC Ethics committee, so there's no need to worry about how your in-game stats might come back to haunt you. However, Sam points out that "there has been very little games psychology research outside of the usual "do video games make people more violent" and there has basically been no research on social simulation games," so if the study gets a load of participants, it may very well make it to a scientific journal. Exciting!

The survey is live right now at animalcrossingsurvey.com, and anyone who's interested can also opt-in at the end to enter a draw for a Switch game of your choice.

[source animalcrossingsurvey.com]