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.