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www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/JTypes2.asp

I’m not a person, I’m a letter.

In fact, I’m four letters: a largely unpronounceable lump called INTJ, which makes me sound like Cro-Magnon man’s number one drinking buddy, but actually means that I’m a little bit Introverted, a little bit iNtuitive (and clearly possessed by questionable beliefs about the rigours of capitalisation), a little bit prone to Thinking, and really, really Judgemental. You probably reckon this is all rubbish. Of course you do, you idiot. How typical.

Well it’s true. At least I think it is, and, remember, thinking is one of my strong points, eh? It has to be true. A lady named Isobel Briggs Myers told me, even though she’s been dead for thirty-odd years.

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is a psychometric questionnaire that measures your psychological preferences: the test subject agrees or disagrees with a series of statements, and at the end, they receive a classification that, to me, looks like a breakdown of the basic characteristics of their personality. I started messing about with the test earlier this week after reading a PC Gamer tweet about Brainhex, a player-preference model created by the promisingly named International Hobo team. Brainhex will tell you what kind of gamer you are, and the results are fascinating enough in their own manner (admission: Brainhex is four pages long and has a title that makes it sound like the world’s lamest board game, so I gave up half-way – obviously not a completer-finisher), but through it I learnt of Myers-Briggs, and it was Myers-Briggs that won my heart. Partly that’s because it seemed much, much shorter, and partly because it’s more directly relevant to the large portions of my life that aren’t spent plugging away at Mario Kart.

By now, the INTPs amongst you will have spotted that the Myers-Briggs isn’t a game, although the one it probably most closely resembles is ID, Mel Croucher’s brilliantly spooky Turing-flavoured rumination on trust, released for the ZX Spectrum. Actually, as with a lot of psychometric tests, it’s hard to decide exactly what Myers-Briggs is, as it seems too spurious and poetic – not to mention too quietly sinister – to be classed as a legitimate scientific instrument. Like many subsets of human metrics, these kind of tools refuse to become entirely respectable: through their practical applications, they can appear to subscribe to a worker ant view of the world most people would like to think we don’t believe in any more – a focus on attaining optimum human productivity by slotting everyone into their correct roles. Besides that, they might simply be busted: echo chambers that merely show us our fantasy identities, trapping us in cycles of vanity or selfishness.

Worse still, these tests often scratch away at our own worst fears about ourselves. Even in the enforced emotional ceasefire of a job interview, they whisper to us that our limitations are hard-wired, that we can’t change, and that our mildest impulses are an open book that others can read.

That’s not to say they aren’t brilliant fun to screw around with, however, and in this regard the Myers-Briggs is an absolute cracker. An offshoot of the work of Carl Jung – now there’s a solid theoretical framework! – the test is one of the most popular preference typing products in the world today, although I strongly suspect its close neighbours may be mood rings and that funny red plastic fish that comes inside Christmas crackers. Whatever its failings, and, depending on what you read, they’re manyfold, you don’t have to believe in it, or even approve of it, to enjoy the experience of taking it.

And that’s because, while the outcomes are interesting, it’s the yes/no statements themselves that have the real appeal. Granted, many seem irrelevant, seeking, in all probability, to pin down a type so foreign to you that you can’t even recognise its responses, but I guarantee that at least a handful of the test’s carefully-weighted maxims will lance you straight through the heart as you see your own behaviour fitting into Myers-Briggs’ aging framework. The cumulative effect of sentences as banal as "You take pleasure in putting things in order," "You usually place yourself nearer to the side than in the centre of the room" and "You get pleasure from solitary walks" made me feel, briefly, like a butterfly pinned fast to a taxonomy board." Others – "You value justice more highly than mercy," was a good example for me – will make you wonder how anyone else on the planet can possibly agree with them.

If it isn’t a game, it feels like it should be part of one: back in the middle of the last century, Briggs Myers could have unwittingly created the ultimate character creation tool for the greatest RPG imaginable: a tool that ignores the inane things, like how wide your nose is or what kind of scar you have, and zeroes in instantly on whether your pirate captain, woodland elf, or space marine is likely to rapidly immerse himself in the social life of his new workplace.

That sounds like a brave new future, and one that has lessons for us all. Perhaps, like the ethical marionettes of Fable or InFamous, psychometric tests are most fulfilling if you play against type, answering questions almost randomly as a free-form experiment in empathy. At the very least, you’ll get some slim manner of insight into what makes other people tick. At best you might be rolling a character you can play in real life.