The text defines personality as “a person’s relatively stable feelings, thoughts, and behavioral patterns” while values are “stable life goals, reflecting what is most important to them.” Pick one of the “Big Five Personality Traits” (see figure 2.5) that details the most important trait for your current job or a position you want to eventual be in. Describe why this is the most important. Give an example of how this personality trait aligns with one of your professional goals.
The Big Five Personality Traits – O.C.E.A.N. – include Openness (Open-Mindedness), Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. Interestingly, there is also a Big Six Personality Traits model – H.E.X.A.C.O. – Honesty-humility, Emotionality (instead of Neuroticism), eXtroversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Openness to Experience. I like H.E.X.A.C.O. framework more because none of the Five Big Personality Traits describe how honest the person is. It is also important to remember, that all Big Personality Traits are common to all people in one way or another.
Recently I am working on a game project. Our team is small, so I have to play different roles – from filling the project wiki with necessary texts and data (such as characters’ information or quests) to 3d modeling of different assets and scene design. I think, that as soon as the tasks are very creative, Openness (or, in other words, Open-Mindedness) is the most important trait for this job.
First of all, even if we have an idea of what we want to create, I have to learn many things about similar games created by other companies previously. It helps to understand, what they did good or bad – thus, we can avoid making the same mistakes. Having the main idea in the head is not enough, too – to be able to write a good quest and story, I need to check several resources giving ideas on how to apply different things the best way. These resources include presentations, articles, books, and even YouTube videos. So, being open-minded is very important: if you do not (or cannot) learn new things, most definitely you will get stuck and/or make crucial mistakes. It might make the story boring or not as interesting as it could be.
3d modeling in my case is the creation of new objects that will appear in our game. All of them should be in the same style and reflect something connected to the story. We want to create a “dark” environment filled with horror stories and scary creatures, so using bright colors or making things around “cute” might lead to several problems. I spend hours looking for references on Pinterest, DeviantArt, and some other resources to come up with the idea of how things should look like in our “world”. After that, keeping in mind all the ideas and inspiration I got from my research, I draw my own reference which I will use for creating a 3d model later. While modeling I often seek interesting guides and tutorials – there are so many different ways to do the same thing, but sometimes people come up with ideas of how to make it easier and faster.
According to the results of the Big Five Project – Personality Test, I have a very high result in Open-Mindedness, which is described as “enjoying having novel experiences and seeing things in new ways”. I think this is the main reason why I really enjoy all steps I have to do for this project.
References
Practical Psychology. (2019, May 7). The Big 5 OCEAN Traits Explained – Personality Quizzes. [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCwHV9HCxH0
Kibeom Lee, Ph.D., & Michael C. Ashton, Ph.D. (2019). The HEXACO personality inventory. Retrieved from http://hexaco.org/
Oliver P. John and Christopher Soto. (2016). The Big Five Project – Personality Text. Retrieved from http://www.outofservice.com/bigfive
Carpenter, M., Bauer, T., & Erdogan, B. (2010). Management Principles, v. 1.1. Retrieved from https://2012books.lardbucket.org/books/management-principles-v1.1/s06-02-personality-and-values.html