The Bartle Test

The final point to mention about player types is the Bartle Test.

I’m often asked about the Bartle Test, on the grounds that because it bears my name I must be responsible for it. Sadly, I’m not. The test is the brainchild of Erwin S. Andreasen and Brandon A. Downey, who wrote it in response to my player types paper so as to test the theory.

The Bartle Test is an online binary-choice questionnaire ¹ that players of virtual worlds can take to discover what player type they are. As such, it offers potentially very useful information for designers. Are players mainly achievers and socializers, as empirical observation would suggest? Just how numerous are killers? Are there large numbers of silent explorers out there that no one knows about? How do the different codebases compare? Answers to these questions could provide solid figures that would help designers visualize the make-up of the user base they have or they want.

The result of having taken the Bartle test is a Bartle Quotient, expressed as three letters. For example, ASK ² means you’re foremost an achiever, then a socializer, and then a killer. The first letter in the result therefore indicates a person’s primary playing style.

Of the 176,000+ people ³ who had taken the test by April 2003, 29% rated as explorers, 25% as socializers, 23% as killers, and 21% as achievers. Of the combinations, SEA was highest at 12%, followed by ESA at 10% and EAS at 8%.

These figures almost certainly do not reflect anything like the actual split among players. Reasons for this include

• Participants in the test are self-selecting. Most don’t hear about it until they’ve played a virtual world for a while, therefore they are not representative of the general user population.

• It is clear from the nature of many of the questions what is being tested for, which means players can give the answer they believe will lead to a cooler rating (for example, explorer or killer) rather than the truth.

• There is no “neither” answer. A socializer being asked to choose between defeating an enemy and exploring an area may as well flip a coin to answer, given that they don’t particularly care for either.

• Some answers favor two or more types. Killers and achievers would probably both prefer defeating an enemy to exploring an area, but the questionnaire can’t disambiguate them.

• Ties aren’t handled very well. If you choose achiever and socializer answers with equal frequency, you will be recorded as favoring A over S.

Just because the test is flawed, that doesn’t mean it’s useless, however. It helps players, for sure, because it lists the virtual worlds that most closely match each player type combination. So many people have taken the test that it has a large database of scores for individual virtual worlds (over 700 of them); if you end a test with a rating of ASK, you’ll be shown a list of the five virtual worlds that have the most players also rating ASK, and the actual percentages involved. Alternatively, if you’re a killer and want to find a game full of socializers to annoy, you can look at the overall statistics and find that out too. The figures may not be formally accurate, but they’re pretty good in relative terms. If one virtual world scores fewer achievers than another, the chances are it really does have fewer achievers ⁴.

For designers, the overall average scores aren’t too helpful as they are skewed by the popularity of the virtual worlds from which the figures are derived. The ratings for individual virtual worlds are of more interest (see Table 3.1).

Table 3.1 Bartle Quotients by Virtual Worlds

This shows the three top-rated quotients for each of the first four virtual worlds to obtain results from 1,000 respondents. There are obvious similarities: None of these quotients involve killers ⁵ and none of them place achievers first. The actuality may be different, of course (EQ is achiever heaven, but you wouldn’t know it from this set of data). However, as relative values they allow some conclusions to be drawn:

• UO and EQ are fairly similar, although UO allows a little more variety (its ratios are slightly lower).

• AC is heavy with explorers—exactly the kind of people who would be expected to like the idea of story arcs.

• DAoC accommodates playing styles less rigidly than the others (its ratios are much lower). This is perhaps because many of its players cut their teeth on UO, EQ, or AC but were unsatisfied; DAoC (with its RvR system) could provide a different experience, so they switched.

Bartle Test results don’t allow designers to infer much about an individual virtual world in isolation. However, the relative effects of a major difference between otherwise similar virtual worlds (for example, ones sharing a codebase) can be judged. If a designer is considering such a feature for their own game, some indication of the possible effects on its user base can thus be derived.

For the record, I haven’t taken the Bartle Test. This isn’t because I object to it—I don’t. Rather, it’s because I can no longer play virtual worlds for fun, so I can’t answer fun-related questions. Any responses I did give would depend solely on the player I was role-playing at the time, which would rather miss the test’s point.