e: To clear things up I'm not criticizing Bartle's work here.
The Bartle Test is a pretty common tool / consideration in gaming psych & gamified interfaces.
What I have a problem with is researchers attempting to drawn a relationship between video game preferences and basic needs. To me this reeks of Jack Thompson.
The point is why they have these preferences, and what these preferences lead to in terms of how different people might approach the same game.
You could present a counter article instead of just telling us how much you don't like the premise of this one.
Anecdotally, I know blasting the crap out of demons in Doom does a pretty good job of channelling my anger. It's cathartic and not something society typically caters for.
A lot of games are about building efficient systems, which naturally would attract people that like solving problems with designs and creativity.
You are dismissing the entire premise of the article based on a dislike for one man that tried (and failed) to convince America that GTA was a murder simulator. A man that (if you bother to read up on what he is up to now) doesn't even believe any of the shit he said back then and actually apologised for it.
Can you provide a pointer to that? I haven't found anything in that regard, either at Wikipedia nor searching at news sites.
He is teaching prisoners civics in Florida now after suffering major stress/depression and marriage problems resulting from his crusade. He went into how the whole thing started because stores were selling violent games to under-age kids and even parents were buying them and that's what he took issue with.
Based on his medical background and knowledge of how entertainment affects the brain he believed that kids that young and also the mentally disabled should not have access to violent games, but because he was beaten in court (multiple times) he began to make tenuous links everywhere between violence and games, music and movies and began behaving very legally dubious in pursuing his cases like a fanatic to the point where he was calling for all-out bans and ridiculous punishments.
He was eventually disbarred and went through a few years of trying not to be such an angry asshole.
From the way the article ended it seemed like he had gone through a positive transformation.
My issue with this article is the entire concept of video games meeting basic needs is extreme reductionism at best. People are complex creatures and almost never have singular reasons for liking a type of entertainment.
People's preferences can be measured and graphed fine, but you can't, in good faith, assign a simple basic needs reason for their preferences.
I'm not saying that there's no such thing as opposing traits, but as far as I know the validated descriptions use continuous dimensions rather than assigning people to corners.
I read "Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit MUDs" while developing my own MUD and it seemed _very_ applicable. Both from a gamer and a developer perspective. I'm not sure the FA's reference to that paper makes it necessarily bad.
That changed in the late 1980s, when the source code for TinyMUDs and MUSHes and DikuMUDs started becoming publicly available, and the userbase fragmented; the playerkillers went onto their games, the guys who wanted to chat went onto the games optimized for that, the roleplayers to another game, and so on. Nowadays, when there is a clash of playertypes, the misfits tend to get policed off the server - playerkiller types will get kicked out of other servers for griefing, people who optimize their gameplay too hard will get thrown off the roleplaying servers, and so on...
Bartle's insight is actually specific to his time period and his game and the few other MUDs (AberMUD, MIST etc) that were around while running one was hard to do. The insight still holds, but it would have been harder to spot at a later date, when everybody went their separate ways...
He specifically doesn't like being given sole credit - http://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2015/QBlog130515A.html
> This is why when people introduce me as "the man who invented online games" or whatever, I always mention that I co-invented them with Roy Trubshaw.
(and the rest of that paragraph)