Learning in Minecraft: A New Paradigm for Psychological Research

This project explores the use of Minecraft as a platform for psychometric research. The first study consisted of a survey of general and Minecraft-specific video gaming behaviors. Minecraft was found to be less challenging and frustrating and more likely to induce positive emotions when compared to other popular video games. Five key aspects of Minecraft gameplay unique from existing gameplay scales were extracted from the results of this survey: social play, competence, redstone engineering, creativity, and survival gameplay. The second study consisted of a Minecraft-based memory task. Interacting with the video game environment was found to improve memory for in-game items, consistent with existing generation effect literature. Participants with high playtime rated functionally related, visually related, and unrelated blocks into three distinct levels of similarity to the target block, indicating that skilled Minecraft players view functional and visual matches as distinct from unrelated foils, but still belonging to distinct categories from each other. Additionally, players who scored high in the creativity scale tended to perform worse at the memory task, while those who scored high in survival performed better, indicating that the way players approach and play the game affects their memory for the in-game items. The third study consisted of a Minecraft-based free sorting task, where Minecraft items were presented to be categorized in-game. Players high in creativity tended to use more categories overall, while players high in competence used more chests and more categories per chest. In addition to the free-sorting task, a forced-choice triad task was used to determine preference for functionally-related or visually-related pairs of blocks. Players high in survival were found to recognize functional categories despite their preference for material categories in the sorting task, demonstrating flexibility with their category use. The results of these studies explore the five factors of Minecraft gameplay and demonstrate that Minecraft is a robust platform for psychometric research with customizable virtual worlds and a feature-rich artificial category structure.