Player Types on Designing Virtual Worlds

The Nature of “Fun”

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Why do people play virtual worlds?

For non-entertainment worlds, the answer may be “because they were told to.” If participation is voluntary, though, the players must expect to get something out of their experience. This may be practical knowledge useful in the real world—playing a MOO to learn to program or to learn a foreign language. For worlds with no pedagogical imperative, though, why do people play?

Isn’t it obvious? To have fun!

Player Types

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

In 1989 and 1990, the senior players of MUD2 got into a debate lasting several months to answer the question, “What do people want out of a MUD?” At its conclusion, I undertook an analysis of their replies, and summarized their ideas of what constituted “fun” for them as falling into one of four categories:

Achievers. These people put the game-like aspect of the virtual world to the fore. They like doing things that achieve defined ¹ goals, thereby progressing their character through the world’s built-in ranking system.

Dynamics

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

In the wild, what effect does increasing the number of wildebeests at a watering hole have on the number of lions in the vicinity? Lions eat wildebeests, so the more wildebeests there are, the greater the number of lions that will turn up looking for a meal. However, wildebeests flee en masse when they so much as sniff a lion. The more lions that show up, the fewer wildebeest will hang around waiting to be eaten. This will lead to a reduction in the number of lions, which will cause an increase in the number of wildebeests, and so on, until equilibrium is reached.

General Observations

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I noted in Chapter 1 that many players of virtual worlds don’t consider themselves to be gamers, even if the virtual world is billed as a game. What’s more, they’re correct—they aren’t gamers.

People sign up to large-scale commercial virtual worlds because these are advertised as games, but once there they don’t necessarily want to play them as games; ironically, games have become the new “noble content.” Players have different ways of amusing themselves. Applying the player types categorizations:

Using Player Types

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Why use the player types model for virtual world design?

One purely pragmatic reason is that because it was the first such model, everyone knows about it; it therefore provides common ground for communicating ideas with other designers. This is by no means the only reason, though.

The model’s main strength is its categorization of players into the four particular types: achievers, explorers, socializers, and killers. It has its roots in a consideration of what people find fun in virtual worlds, and is therefore attuned to situations that might impact on this: all big design decisions, in other words. If you’re creating a virtual world and don’t have an actual user base yet, categorizing it along the lines the model advocates will give you some idea of how the players might take to a feature (or not); if you’re running a live game, the model will suggest how proposed changes might be received by existing players.

The Newbie Flow

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Imagine that your virtual world is a bucket, and players are water. There are holes in the bucket through which the water escapes. If you don’t add water regularly, eventually it will all leak away. There may be a pool at the very bottom that isn’t high enough to reach the lowest hole—that’s you and your die-hard players. Eventually, even this will evaporate away, though.

All virtual worlds need a flow of newbies if they are to survive. It doesn’t matter how wonderful your world is or how dedicated your players are: If you don’t have newbies, you’re in big trouble.

The Bartle Test

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

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.