Personality and Dark Gaming: The relationships between Perfectionism, the Dark Triad, and Anti-Social Online Gaming Behaviour

Online gaming is an increasingly popular social and competitive activity. Through playing online games, people can connect with other people from around the world. However, many people can display a darker side of their personality, which could lead them to engage in undesirable online communications and behaviours. The aim of this project was to investigate the incremental predictive ability of the Dark Triad (Machiavellianism, Narcissism, and Psychopathy) and perfectionism (self-oriented perfectionism, socially prescribed perfectionism, other- oriented perfectionism, and OOP-90) in examining addiction and aggression in online gaming. Participants were 214 (n = 180 males, n = 31 females, n = 3 self- described gender) online shooter gamers aged between 18 and 57 years, recruited through online gaming forums. Participants completed an online questionnaire, including measures of the Dark Triad, perfectionism, and gaming addiction and online harassment. A hierarchical regression model indicated that, in step one, only Machiavellianism was a significant positive predictor of addiction. In step two, socially prescribed perfectionism was an additional positive predictor of addiction. A second hierarchical regression model indicated that, in step one, Psychopathy was a significant positive predictor of aggression. In step two, OOP-90 was an additional positive predictor of aggression. The findings indicate that both the Dark Triad and perfectionism predict dark gaming in the form of addiction and aggression, and perfectionism explains a significant amount of additional variance in dark gaming alongside the Dark Triad