General information

The following study “What Does My Character Say About Me? Personality Traits and Character Creation in Baldur’s Gate 3” is conducted as part of a bachelor’s thesis in Media Informatics at Saarland University, in cooperation with the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI).

Voluntary participation and freely given consent

Your participation in this study is entirely voluntary. By continuing with the survey, you provide informed consent. You can withdraw your consent at any time before the end of data collection without providing any reason. Simply close your browser window or use the cancel button. Any incomplete or withdrawn datasets will be deleted.

Once data collection is complete, data will be anonymized and cannot be linked to individual participants. At that point, data protection rights such as access, correction, or deletion can no longer be applied.

What data do we collect from you?

After consent to the collection of data, the following data are collected and processed anonymously:

• Demographic data (age, gender, nationality – all optional)
• Self-assessment of personality using a standardized questionnaire
• Evaluations of customization categories in Baldur’s Gate 3
• A savesgame from Baldur's Gate 3 can be used to analyse your created character (optional)

Please do not enter personal or sensitive information into any free-text fields in the survey.

Survey Structure and Savegame Upload

The study consists of two linked LimeSurvey questionnaires:

1. The first survey collects your demographic data, personality self-assessment, and your evaluations of the character creation process.
2. The second survey is used for uploading your Baldur’s Gate 3 savegame and includes specific follow-up questions about your character.

Both surveys are connected via a randomly generated anonymous ID that does not contain any personal identifiers. This ID enables linking your responses while maintaining full anonymity.

For technical reasons, data such as the following, which your internet browser transmits to us or to our web space provider (so called server log files), is collected:

• type and version of the browser you use
• operating system
• websites that linked you to our site (referrer URL)
• date and time of your visit
• your Internet Protocol (IP) address

The aforementioned listed data is not merged with the survey data. On this website we use so-called cookies. Cookies are small files that are stored by your web browser. The cookies used on our website do not cause any damage to your computer and do not contain any malicious software. They enable a user-friendly and effective use of this website. We use permanent cookies with a maximum validity period of 365 days. We use these cookies exclusively to exclude multiple participation.

Data Anonymization and Storage

With the transfer of the collected data to our server, an anonymization takes place, which makes it practically impossible to assign the collected data to a person, as long as no personal data is entered in free text fields.

Please note: The character name included in the uploaded savegame is chosen by you the participant, and cannot be automatically anonymized during the upload process due to technical limitations. Although technically present in the data, the character name is not used in the evaluation process and is entirely ignored during analysis.

• The savegame is temporarily stored on the DFKI LimeSurvey server and deleted after being transferred to cloud storage managed by the Department of Computer Science at Saarland University and to a local external hard drive for analysis purposes. The data will be retained until the end of the study.
• Survey data from completed responses remain stored on the DFKI LimeSurvey server and are also transferred locally.

All locally stored data (on the external hard drive) is anonymized. Therefore, even in the event of theft or loss, no personal identification is possible.

What do we use your data for?

The results and data are used exclusively for scientific research purposes. Specifically, they will be used in my bachelor thesis and may be published there in whole or in part. In addition, the anonymized survey and character data will be made available to employees of the DFKI and Saarland University, who may also use them exclusively for scientific research purposes (e.g. writing a publication on this topic). Data that is published cannot be related back to you personally.

The savegame itself is only used to extract relevant, anonymized character-related data (excluding the character name). After the completion of the study and the bachelor thesis, all savegame files will be permanently deleted. Only anonymized data, both the extracted character data and the survey results, will be retained for further scientific use.

Contact person

This study is conducted by Marco Weiss (mawe00007@stud.uni-saarland.de) under the supervision of Dr.-Ing. Pascal Lessel (pascal.lessel@dfki.de) at the DFKI.

If you have any questions that are not answered in this privacy statement, or if you would like further information on data protection, please contact our data protection officer (datenschutz@dfki.de).

Right of Appeal

You have the right to complain to a supervisory authority if you are of the opinion that the processing of your personal data violates statutory data protection regulations.