How Cities: Skylines is Helping Psychologists Understand Complex Personality Disorders
Scientists have turned to the metropolitan managment game Cities: Skylines to shed light on the relationship between personality traits and complex problem solving.
As part of the study, spotted by Psypost, the researchers asked a pool of 242 volunteers with personality disorders such as schizotypal, histrionic, and dependent to play Cities: Skylines to see how these traits affected their performance at the management sim.
The overriding goal of Paradox’s Interactive's Cities: Skylines is to steadily grow your settlement from a small town into a thriving megatropolis. This can only be done by ensuring that your city has the correct blend of commercial, industrial, and residential districts, all of which must be connected by a network of roads.
On top of that you’ll need to balance finances, and ensure access to essential resources and services like electricity, clean water, garbage disposal, and public transport, while also paying heed to the myriad needs of the city’s population.
Assuming that you can successfully spin all those plates at once, more and more people will flock to your city, forcing you to adapt and reinvent the infrastructure on the fly to cope with the needs of the ever increasing citizenry.
However, mistakes in planning can lead to a cascade of issues that will see your city fall prey to rampant criminality and widespread dilapidation, as high rise apartments catch fire, and entire industrial districts are left abandoned. If you’re really bad at the game (like me), then entire sections of your once proud city will be little more than a depopulated husk that Batman himself wouldn’t attempt to set right with a ten foot batarang.
This, is the complex digital playground that the researchers used to examine
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