The role of personality on disordered gaming and game genre preferences in adolescence: gender differences and person-environment transactions

Abstract

Playing video games is one of the world’s most popular leisure activities, especially for teenagers. The main aim of the present study was to examine additive and moderation effects of gender and personality to explain individual differences in problematic gaming and video game genre preferences in adolescence. 776 Spanish high school students (mean age = 14.29 years, SD = 1.59, 50.64% girls) completed the questionnaires of the Five-Factor Model of personality, frequency of video gaming, disordered use, and the video games they mostly played. Gender differences were observed for gaming behaviors: Boys played more and presented much more disordered gaming than girls. Boys preferred competitive genres; for example, action-shooters, sport, fight and strategy games. Girls preferred nonviolent and ocasional game genres; for example, social simulation, and brain and skill games. Gender moderated the association between personality and disordered gaming: Disordered gaming was associated with low agreeableness and low conscientiousness in boys, and with low extraversion and low conscientiousness in girls. Low consciousnness moderated the association between gaming frequency and problematic use of video games: Playing more video games led to disordered gaming, mainly in irresponsible and impulsive individuals. Though small, significant associations were found among all of the personality domains and video game genre preferences. These findings highlight the relevance of gender and personality for gaming behaviors in adolescence, and suggest paying more attention to gender-dependent differences and person-environment transactional processes when studying gaming- related behaviors.