Author Archives: David Mullich
What Type of Gamer Are You Today?
In my post from last week, I described the many different reasons why we play games. But if there are different reasons why people play gamer, doesn’t that suggest that there are different types of games? Now, if you ask a member of the self-described “gamer”culture, he or she (most likely it will be a “he”) will tell you that there is only one type of gamer: someone who plays hardcore shooting, fighting, or real-time strategy games; everyone else is not a “true” gamer. However, I suspect that the truth goes deeper than that.
I am hardly the first person to ponder the question of different player types. In 1996, Professor Richard Bartle, a game researcher best known for being the co-creator of MUD1 (the first Multi-User Dungeon) in 1978 and the author of the seminal book Designing Virtual Worlds, presented a paper that evolved into what is now called The Bartle Test of Gamer Psychology. This test is a series of questions and an accompanying scoring formula that classifies players of multiplayer online games (including MUDs and MMORPGs) into categories based on their gaming preferences. The result of the Bartle Test is the “Bartle Quotient”, which is calculated based on the answers to a series of 30 random questions in the test, and totals 200% across all categories, with no single category exceeding 100%.
The Bartle Test is based on a character theory. This character theory consists of four characters:
- Killers, who like to provoke and cause drama over other players.
- Achievers, who are competitive and enjoy beating difficult challenges.
- Explorers, who like to explore the world – not just its geography but also the finer details of the game mechanics.
- Socializers, who are often more interested in having relations with the other players than playing the game itself.
These character types are often described as a quadrant model where the X-axis represents preference for interacting with other players vs. exploring the world and the Y-axis represents preference for interaction vs. unilateral action.
In more recent years, practitioners of gamification, the process of applying game mechanics to non-game environments such as work, commerce, health, activism and education to motivate engagement and loyalty, have seized on Bartle’s Player Types to help them determine which game mechanics are most effective with different types of users. The problem is that the Bartle Player Types was meant to categorize the motivations of players in Multi-User Dungeons, and any attempt to apply them in a different environment is a misrepresentation of Bartle’s work.
One gamification designer whose work I do admire, Andrzej Marczewski, came up with an alternate set of user types, with some consultation with Richard Bartle, if I am not mistaken. In this model, there are six types of users:
- Socialisers are motivated by Relatedness. They want to interact with others and create social connections.
- Free Spirits are motivated by Autonomy and Self-Expression. They want to create and explore.
- Achievers are motivated by Mastery. They are looking to learn new things and improve themselves. They want challenges to overcome.
- Philanthropists are motivated by Purpose and Meaning. This group are altruistic, wanting to give to other people and enrich the lives of others in some way with no expectation of reward.
- Players are motivated by Rewards. They will do what is needed of them to collect rewards from a system. They are in it for themselves.
- Disruptors are motivated by Change. In general, they want to disrupt your system, either directly or through other users to force positive or negative change.
As I look through these user types, I can see myself and what motivates me when I play games or engage in other experiences. Yet I don’t always have the same motivations for each game I play or experience I engage in. As Johan Huizinga explained in his concept of the Magic Circle, when we engage in play (or any other type of ritual), we agree to take on different roles. When I play Tetris, I’m motivated by Mastery. When I play World of Warcraft, I’m motivated by Autonomy and Self-Expression. When I’m at the gambling tables of Las Vegas, I’m motivated by Rewards. And when I take on the role of teacher, I’m motivated by Purpose and Meaning.
As we play different games, perhaps we all are different types of gamers, based upon our mood or need at at the time.
So, what type of gamer am I? Depends on what game we’re playing today!
Why Do We Play Games?
We play games because they’re FUN!
Duh!
Okay, okay. That’s not much of a blog post, so we can’t stop there. Let’s take a close look into what makes games fun to play.
Game designer Horst Streck describes fun as “the enjoyment of pleasure.” So, not only does an experience have to be pleasurable to be fun, one has to actively enjoy it. That is, one needs to be receptive to the pleasurable sensations. For example, a shoulder rub can be very pleasurable at times. But if someone tries to rub your shoulders when you’re trying to concentrate on a frustrating, time-sensitive task, you may find the experience annoying. For you to enjoy the sensation, you have to be a willing participant. No one can make you have fun; you need motivation to be receptive to fun.
MMO game pioneer Professor Richard Bartle, famous for the defining the Bartle Player Types in virtual worlds, says that when we play a game, we experiment with four main motivations:
- Achievement: Trying to get more points
- Immersion: Imagining oneself in the game world
- Competition: Trying to defeat opponents
- Cooperation: Working together as a team
Bartle is also famous for describing the four Bartle Player Types he’s identified in virtual worlds – Achievers, Explorers, Killers, and Socializers – suggesting that each of us finds different things to be fun.
Now, Bartle has said that his model only applies to players in multi-user dungeons, but different game designers have different models for what players find to be fun. Game Designers use the term “play value” for the reasons why a particular player enjoys playing a particular game. XEODesign CEO Nicole Lazzaro describes what she calls the Four Keys of Fun for describing the play value of a game:
- Easy Fun (Novelty): Curiosity from exploration, role-play, and creativity.
- Hard Fun (Challenge): Fiero, the epic win, from achieving a difficult goal.
- People Fun (Friendship): Amusement from competition and cooperation.
- Serious Fun (Meaning): Excitement from changing the player and their world.
A game such as Dungeons & Dragons might be fun to some people due to its Novelty aspect, according to Lazzaro’s Four Keys, while Tetris provides hard fun through Challenge.
Again, this is but one of several theories as to why we play games.
The landmark paper MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research written by game designers Robin Hunicke, Marc LeBlanc and Robert Zubek in 2004, divided aesthetics within games into eight categories:
- Sensation: Game as sense-pleasure
- Fantasy: Game as make-believe
- Narrative:Game as unfolding story
- Challenge: Game as obstacle course
- Fellowship: Game as social framework
- Discovery: Game as uncharted territory
- Expression: Game as soap box
- Submission (or Abnegation):Game as mindless pastime
According to the paper, when game designers create games, they tend to focus on the actions of a games first. When the player performs that action and interacts with the game, they experience the dynamic of that interaction, which in turn produces aesthetics, or emotions, for the player. Hunicke and her colleagues recommended that game designers should first determine what aesthetics they want for the player and then determine the mechanics that will elicit those feelings.
Gamification designer Victor Manrique, proprietor of the Epic Win Blog, writes that the specific reason that people play games is that games allow them to experience emotions that are closely related to the main factors of happiness. Thus, we play games because they make us happy. So, we again have to ask a question: what is happiness?
Psychologist Martin Seligman provides the acronym PERMA in his book Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being to summarize the factors that seem to make people happy:
- Pleasure: tasty food, warm baths, etc.
- Engagement (or flow): the absorption of an enjoyed yet challenging activity
- Relationships: social ties have turned out to be extremely reliable indicator of happiness
- Meaning: a perceived quest or belonging to something bigger
- Accomplishments: having realized tangible goals.
In another book, Game On, game designer John Radoff, lists 42 things that are fun, and mostly all of them involve emotions that are related to a PERMA factor. Here are a few:
- Relaxing: Pleasure
- Competition: Engagement
- Organizing Groups of People: Relationships
- Improving Society: Meaning
- Triumph Over Conflict: Accomplishments
Dr. Steven Reiss, Psychology and Psychiatry professor emeritus at the Ohio State University, categorizes our motivations in even finer detail by describing 16 different human motivators and their object of desire. If we were to take Reiss’ work and associate these objects of desires with the goals in a particular game, we can come to the conclusion that when we play, it seems that our motivations for playing are closely linked to our general human motivations.
- Power: Influence (Balance of Power)
- Curiosity: Knowledge (Civilization)
- Independence: Self-reliance (Oregon Trail)
- Acceptance: Being part of a group (Guild Wars 2)
- Order: Organization (Tetris)
- Saving: Collecting things (Farmville)
- Honor: Loyalty (Football)
- Idealism: Social justice (Amnesty the Game)
- Social Contact: Companionship (Pictionary)
- Family: Raising children (The Sims)
- Status: Social standing (World of Warcraft)
- Vengeance: getting even (Angry Birds)
- Romance: Sex and beauty (Leisure Suit Larry)
- Physical Activity: Exercise (Twister)
- Tranquility: Emotional calm (Candy Crush)
- Eating: Food (Pac-Man)
Don’t snicker! I once had a girlfriend during the Golden Age of arcade games who loved (healthy) eating, and she told me in all seriousness that the reason why she enjoyed playing Ms. Pac-Man is that as she watched the character consume dots, it satisfied her urge to eat!
Of course, many players can’t explain well why we like to play a particular game as well as my ex-girlfriend could, so game designers will look towards Behavioral Psychology and other models to better understand why certain aspects of a game appeal to particular players.
Ubisoft Creative Director designer Jason VandenBerghe turned to Behavior Psychology – specifically to the Big Five personality traits – for a talk he gave at the 2012 Game Developers Conference. In this talk, called “Domains of Play”, he presented the five elements of a game that appeal to primary human motivations.
- Novelty: Distinguishes open, imaginative experiences from repeating, conventional ones. Some games, such as World of Warcraft, rely on surprises and fantasy for providing fun, whereas for others, like Trivial Pursuit, the fun is in recalling known facts about the real world.
- Challenge: Determined by much effort or self-control the player is expected to use in order to achieve the game’s goals. Some games, such as Tetris, are fun because they are so challenging, whereas others, like Solitaire, the fun is that they are mindless pastimes.
- Stimulation: Specifies is the emotional element and social engagement of play. Games like Pictionary can be fun to play because of the humor and excitement of interacting with your friends, whereas others, like Chess, are more cerebral enjoyment.
- Harmony: Reflects the rules of player-to-player (or game system) interaction and whether the goal of the game is to harm or to help. Doom is fun to play because you are trying to harm the other players, whereas the fun in SimCity is in building a city.
- Threat: Reflects the game’s capacity to trigger negative emotions in the player. Games like Poker can be fun to play because of the risk of losing, but other games, like Candy Crush, are fun to play because you simply progress forward without ever losing.
As you can see, game designers put a lot of thought into determining just what makes games fun to play because it helps them to figure out what is wrong when playtesters report that there game is not fun at all. There are a lot of different models and theories as to exactly what different people find fun. Anyone interested in game design should keep current on the research into this topic, because you never want to be in the position of saying “Duh”, when your development team, or your marketing person, or your boss asks you why players will want to play your game concept.
David Mullich 