Other Categorizations

Although my player types categorization is perhaps the best known of those available to designers, it is not the only one. There are many others, of which three are of particular interest. Two of these are based on anecdotal evidence, and one on statistics.

Social Dimensions

One of the earliest systems to use a primarily graphical interface was Habitat, which appeared in the mid-1980s. Although not strictly speaking a virtual world (it was essentially a graphical chat room), it nevertheless did have close similarities and is regarded as an important milestone in the development of graphical virtual worlds.

The system administrator ¹ of Habitat between 1986 and 1988 (during what would nowadays be called its beta-test phase) was F. Randall Farmer. In 1992, he wrote a paper describing some of his observations about the social dimensions of online communities ².

Randy noticed that players behave in one of five different ways:

• Passives. People who want to be entertained without effort on their part. Habitat was only one of their online activities. 75% of players by number, but only 20% by connect time.

• Actives. Players for whom Habitat was their main online activity. They got involved as soon as they logged in, and used up most of the total connect time.

• Motivators. People who make life interesting for the other players by organizing events, setting up institutions, opening debates. A good ratio is one motivator for every 50 passives and actives.

• Caretakers. Mature motivators, who may be employees of the developer. They helped newbies, mediated conflicts, noted bugs, and did other things that would today fall into the province of customer service.

• Geek Gods ³. The designers and implementers who ensure that the virtual world works, and who make changes when it doesn’t.

The categories here are quite vague, and two of them concern groups of people not normally considered to be proper “players” anyway. However, it’s not so much the categorizations that are important as the fact that Randy noticed there was a pattern involved—what he called the Path of Ascension. Players started off as passives, then became actives, then motivators, then caretakers, then finally geek gods. People should be encouraged to move along the path in order to develop a vibrant, thriving community.

It may seem today that all this is fairly obvious. Of course you should try to get people more involved in the community! Did people really ever think differently?

Yes they did. Back then, players were frequently lumped together as an amorphous mass, especially by the big online services. There was a recognition that there were useful “mother hen” people who would do all your organizing for you happily and without pay, but no one gave any thought to where these individuals might come from—they were just there. Randy pointed out how they got there, and how to get them there.

Unfortunately (for them), this had little influence on the big online services. The way they saw it, there were fewer people at each step of the path, so transition meant a loss of players. If 75% of the players were using 20% of the bandwidth, then any movement would reduce the overall number of players while increasing the bandwidth. Even with players being charged by the hour, this was too big a price to pay, so they kept the status quo. As a result, the community became sterile and unattractive to newbies.

The Path of Ascension concerns the development of players as they grow in maturity. As such, at least in its first three steps it ought to be related to the main sequence of the player types model; we’ll see how, exactly, a little later.

A further refinement to the idea of progression came with the notion of “Circles.”

Circles

Circles is the name given by then Ultima Online player Hedron to his 1998 ¹ description of how players advance through different states of maturity. Although it is not a particularly well-known approach, I shall describe it here because it makes some very insightful observations ².

Hedron’s vision is of virtual world players organized as concentric circles. They begin in the outer circles, and advance in their experience and attitudes through the inner circles; the analogy is (ultimately) the mandala of Buddhism, which adherents can use to symbolize conditions of spirituality that they desire to re-create through mental exercises.

From observation, Hedron postulates six circles, representing six increasingly higher states of being for players in virtual worlds:

• First Circle—Survival. Players begin as newbies. Their main concerns are acquiring the basic skills, stats, and items they need simply to survive.

• Second Circle—Competence. After players have sufficient expertise so that they can make progress, they begin to do so. The virtual world becomes more “fun.”

• Third Circle—Excel. Having become “pretty good,” players aim to become “very good.” They seek out the toughest challenge that they can find in order to “beat” it.

• Fourth Circle—Prove Mastery. Having acquired technical mastery, players feel the need to demonstrate this to other players. They will typically do this either by helping/mentoring/leading or by attacking them ³.

• Fifth Circle—Seek New Challenges. Players feel that they have exhausted everything that the virtual world has programmed in for them to do. The only entertainment left is interaction with other players.

• Sixth Circle—Everything Is One. Players recognize all ways that people can play the virtual world, and have a full understanding of the merits of them all. Players accept and appreciate each other, the virtual world, and the way things are.

Hedron’s article goes into some depth about the options available to players at the fifth circle, at least one of which (leaving to play some other virtual world) does not necessarily lead to the sixth circle. There’s no need to discuss that here, however.

All three of the approaches discussed so far rely on the observations of individuals for their substance. There is a more scientific approach available, however: statistics.

Facets

The most extensive study of the player base for any individual virtual world is Nick Yee’s The Norrathian Scrolls ¹. This important survey is famed for both its extensiveness and its statistical rigor. It considers the real-world and in-game demographics for EverQuest, and correlates the two. For example, it provided concrete evidence that (on the whole) male players tend more toward achievement than female players and that (on the whole) female players tended more toward socializing. Its scope also considered other issues of use to academic researchers (for example virtual gender-bending).

Although The Norrathian Scrolls found differences among players based on their real-world demographics, they were not strong enough to be of use to designers. Yes, on the whole male players are more driven by achievement than female players, but there are nevertheless plenty of female players who are achievers and plenty of male ones who are socializers. Nick therefore decided to undertake a second survey to look for more fundamental differences—ones that did not make reference to real-world demographics.

In March 2002, he introduced the notion of facets ².

The point of Nick Yee’s second study was to answer the question, “What do people want out of a game?” ³. The methodology employed was to ask respondents a series of multi-choice questions concerning their motivation for playing in graphical virtual worlds ⁴, then running a statistical analysis on the results. The multichoice questions themselves were constructed so as to act as indicators for the four player types and a number of other relationships that Nick had noticed in his previous studies. The point of this was to see if the answers that players provided really did cluster toward the player types, or whether there were more “natural” motivational groupings.

A factor analysis of the responses discovered five significant motivations (the facets):

• Relationship. The desire to make meaningful relationships with other players in the virtual world.

• Immersion. The desire to become immersed in the virtual world.

• Grief. The desire to objectify other players for personal gain.

• Achievement. The desire to become powerful within the context of the virtual world.

• Leadership. The assertiveness and sociability of the player.

Immersion and leadership are qualities not addressed in the player types model. Relationship matches the socializer type well, emphasizing the formation of relationships as a primary motivation. Achievement matches the achiever type well, too, with evidence that the reason players like to achieve is so as to become powerful in the virtual world. Grief corresponds roughly with killers, although not to the extent that it covers the “interfering busybody” variety. Most interestingly, explorers don’t appear to exist as a type at all.

Because of the lack of evidence for explorers, the survey was amended to promote those factors that would indicate their existence ⁵. Nevertheless, the result did not change. Either: Explorers do not play graphical virtual worlds; explorers do not answer questionnaires; explorers subvert questionnaires; or, explorer is an insignificant type (if it exists at all). This is especially interesting because it seems to contradict the findings of the Bartle Test (which in turn contradicts my own empirical observations).

Of course, the study has its flaws, many of which are discussed in the paper itself. Among the most pertinent are

• The motivations suggested by the survey are implicit in the questions.

• Brainstorming motivations is as subjective as brainstorming player types.

• There is no guarantee that there are only five facets, just that there are at least five facets.

• There is no guarantee that the facets are all at the same level of abstraction. They might be like “orange, banana, lemon, lime, fruit.”

• The labeling of the facets is not provided by the factor analysis.

• Some of the facets overlap, but some don’t. Leadership could be an expression of an achievement, grief, or relationship facet, but not of immersion.

None of these flaws are show-stoppers at this stage of the research. More work needs to be done, of course, particularly in constructing an underlying mechanism to model the motivations, but already there are some interesting results. The non-appearance of explorers is perhaps the most significant of these, but a follow-up study ⁶ also suggested a number of others. From a designer’s point of view, the big ones are

• Highly immersive does not mean highly addictive (and vice versa). Players can feel they are in a world without suffering withdrawal when they are absent from it.

• Immersion and addiction both imply retention. Players who experience strong feelings of presence in a virtual world, or who feel anxious when they are not playing, will keep their accounts for longer.

• Stickiness is strongest for relationships, then for achievement, then for leadership. If you want people to stay with your virtual world for longer, you should first and foremost try to foster relationships between them. It’s more effective than locking them into an advancement system. It’s more effective than locking them into a team.

These observations alone would make facets worthy of serious consideration by designers, and further research in this area is eagerly awaited. It’s good to know what the correlations are, but it would be better if we knew why they are. If a model could be devised which was able to articulate the causalities that lead to these conclusions, we’d have a theory rather than merely data. Designers could then use it both predictively and quantitatively, backed up by actual numbers.

Facets have the potential to supersede player types as the de facto means by which players are categorized. More research is necessary, but for the moment the results are very promising.

Levels of Immersion

One of Nick Yee’s facets is immersion. This is a concept with a long and distinguished history in role-playing contexts ¹, and it has been mentioned a number of times already in this book. So what, exactly, is it?

Fundamentally, immersion is the sense that a player has of being in a virtual world. The more immersive a virtual world, the greater its ability to immerse its players. Some virtual worlds (particularly non-game ones) deliberately aim for low immersion, so as not to distract from their purpose; most, however, aim to be as immersive as possible.

Although players can experience many degrees of immersion, there are conceptual or emotional barriers along the way that players must pass if they are to proceed further. Immersion can therefore most usefully be described in terms of a series of levels:

• Player

• Avatar

• Character

• Persona

The human being sitting at the computer, interacting with the virtual world, is a player. The player will be controlling an object within the virtual world that is associated with them. The way the player regards that object is a measure of their immersion. If they consider it simply to be a computer construction with which they don’t identify (as they might, say, a document in a word processor), then they are not immersed.

Most players of virtual worlds easily identify with the object they control. At the very least, they regard the object as their representative in the virtual world. For them, the object is their avatar—a puppet that they control and the conduit through which they act. Players will refer to their avatars in the third person, but may flesh them out with a few personality quirks. “Alice has a thing about cats, so she won’t go near them.” On the whole, though, avatars are mere conveniences—ways to effect change in a virtual world.

The next stage is for players to stop thinking of the object they control as their representative, but rather as their representation. The object is a tokenization of the player. This is the character level, at which the majority of players are found. A character is an extension of a player’s self, a whole personality that the player dons when they enter the virtual world. Players may maintain several characters, each a distinct and rounded personality, which the player treats as a friend. Characters are referred to by name; although a player might say, “I lost my sword last night,” what they mean is more like, “Thorina lost her sword when I was playing her last night.”

Avatars are dolls, characters are simulacra, but neither are people. The final level of immersion—the one which makes virtual worlds wholly different to anything else—is that of the persona.

A persona is a player, in a world. That’s in it. Any separate distinction of character is gone—the player is the character. You’re not role-playing a being, you are that being; you’re not assuming an identity, you are that identity; you’re not projecting a self, you are that self. If you’re killed in a fight, you don’t feel that your character has died, you feel that you have died ². There’s no level of indirection, no filtering, no question: You are there.

This is something that many people examining virtual worlds from the outside fail to understand. Avatars and characters are just steps along the way. Looking at characters to try to develop an understanding of why virtual worlds are so appealing is pointless except in the case of die-hard role-players. Sometimes full immersion is likened to an altered state of consciousness ³; this is much closer to the truth, but still misses the mark (you can daydream while in a virtual world without leaving it).

It’s about identity. When player and character merge to become a persona, that’s immersion; that’s what people get from virtual worlds that they can’t get from anywhere else; that’s when they stop playing the world and start living it.

I should point out that my use of some of the terms here is rather technical. In my explanation of the different levels of immersion, I was at pains to refer to the object that the player is associated with as just that, an “object.” In everyday use, designers will use the terms “players,” “avatars,” and “characters” almost interchangeably. Even at the technical level, there can be differences: Some designers, for example, use “avatar” to refer strictly to what I have called “character,” preferring “puppet” for what I have called “avatar;” others use it to refer to the graphical representation of a character as rendered on a screen (as opposed to the in-world object itself). There’s also a possible additional level between player and avatar, subordinate, whereby the player treats their world object as an independent agent able to obey commands but capable of autonomous action; in practice, though, virtual worlds are set up such that almost every player skips the stage entirely.

Immersion is connected to the computer-mediated communication (CMC) idea of presence—the illusion that a mediated experience is not mediated ⁴. Presence manifests in several forms, of which two (“presence as immersion” and “presence as transportation”) together correspond well with what virtual world designers mean by “immersion;” others, particularly “presence as realism,” can help effect immersion.

In a CMC context, transportation concerns is the sense a user has that something is elsewhere from where it really is; for virtual worlds, the “something” is the player and the “elsewhere” is the virtual world. The CMC idea of immersion does not rely on transportation, but is otherwise quite similar to what virtual world designers mean by the term. The main difference is one of emphasis: CMC researchers view “perceptual immersion” and “psychological immersion” as equal partners; virtual world designers view psychological immersion as paramount, considering perceptual immersion to be merely one of many possible means to achieve that end.

Immersion is also connected with the psychological concept of flow ⁵. Indeed, some designers see the two as equivalent. Flow is an exhilarating sense of control and mastery that can arise from pursuing a focused, goal-driven activity; it’s a deep involvement that transcends distractions and sense of time, leading to an ecstatic state of peak productivity. However, although flow regularly occurs in virtual worlds, it’s not the kind of immersion that I’m talking about here. Players can be fully immersed without any sense of ecstasy—indeed, they could be quite miserable. Flow and immersion (as I mean it here) can play off each other, but neither is dependent on the other.

Immersion is an important concept in virtual world design, because it plays so much a part in conveying the entire virtual experience. Without immersion, there is a fence between player and virtual world; with immersion, the barriers are lifted—players can concentrate on doing what they want to do, on being what they want to be.

That said, the role of immersion is often misunderstood. It’s an important facilitator, but that’s all it is: Although players intensely enjoy being immersed, imbuing immersion is not itself the ultimate aim of virtual world design. It does lie on the right path, but a little further back than many designers suppose.

I’m getting increasingly philosophical here, but it’s not immersion itself that is intoxicating; rather, it’s what immersion helps deliver: identity.