Rocket League: Traits, Abilities, and Performance

Cognitive abilities and personality traits contribute to performance in many video games. However, hybrid games (e.g., Rocket League, where soccer meets racing) are underexplored in that regard. Here's what you need to know about them.

The most well-known video games are genre-specific. However, some games are crossovers, such as Rocket League. In that game, you role-play as a car, trying to emulate Cristiano Ronaldo's ability to score goals, Usain Bolt's and Michael Schuhmacher's boosting skills.

Like in every other activity, players try to be as good as they can. And like in every activity, some are better than others, which begs the question: what makes them better? Usual suspects researchers gravitate towards first are personality traits and cognitive abilities. And, no surprise, personality traits, depending on the game genre, are associated with better performance, and so are better cognitive abilities.

However, hybrid games have not yet been investigated. It’s still unclear which personality traits or cognitive abilities contribute to performance. But we are lucky, because we're about to find out.

🤯 Mind in the Eyes!

After analyzing data from 246 participants, some in-game (performance) metrics did indeed correlate with cognitive abilities and personality traits. Let's start with a weird one: Reading the Mind in the Eyes Task, which is a measure of theory of mind—you know, when you're able to see the world through the eyes of others.

"... participants were presented with pictures of human faces, cropped to only show the area around the eyes, and judged the emotion displayed in the picture... For each question, participants were presented with four emotion words and were asked to select which word best matched the emotion displayed." [1]

Turns out, the better you are at understanding others emotions, the better you may be at Rocket League, specifically in saves and positioning. Similarly, if participants were good at mentally rotating objects, they were better at boosting, moving, shooting goals, saves, and positioning. So far for cognitive abilities. What about personality traits?

The researchers found two correlations: agreeableness (scoring high means you're likely to say more yes, avoid conflict, and strive for everyone getting along well) and conscientiousness (a higher score means you're more diligent, organized, and enjoy planning) with boosting, and openness (high score = you like new experiences, art etc.) with saves.

"Players with higher mental rotation scores tended to score and save more goals and take more shots." [1]

Also, players higher in neuroticism (higher scores mean they were more prone to negative emotions) took fewer shots, while those higher in openness took more shots.

🥡 The Takeaways

What are the takeaways? Pretty simple. Different games require different abilities. You may not be good in one game, but you may be in another one. The same goes for personality traits. As we've seen in previous episodes, having high scores in some areas of personality is better for performance in some games, or even roles. What you could do is take a personality test, see where you land, and choose a role or game (genre) based on that to increase your odds of winning. However, if you don't like playing a specific game, then what's the point of it?

Thanks for reading, and I hope you all have a great week. Later,

Christian 🙂

References

[1] Bonny, 2024