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Comment by DylanBohlender | Hacker News Reader

Richard Bartle is a luminary in the field of game design. He invented a system for classifying gamers' preferred game actions called the "Bartle taxonomy", which helps game designers understand player motivations better. Think of it like user personas in software development - Killers love competition, Explorers love discovery, Achievers love mastery, and Socializers play games for social reasons. When designing a game for mass appeal it's often important to make sure players of all stripes find reasons to enjoy it, and Bartle's taxonomy is a great framework for analyzing how different types of players will interact with a game.

You can take an online version of the Bartle taxonomy questionnaire to get your own results here:

http://matthewbarr.co.uk/bartle/

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Psychologists could learn a lot from humans if they'd start building games and observe them.

Also, game-designers could learn a lot from psychologists. Whenever I heard Bartle's taxonomy for the first time during a game studies course, my question was (and still is): why is a taxonomy the best way to capture this? In a personality research course it became clear to me that the biggest successful models are dimensional in nature (e.g. five factor model/big 5) they are not taxonomies.

I'd love for more psychologist/personality researchers to team up with game-designers. I think it could advance some scientific discoveries into human behavior.

The test as I created it (that site uses a copy of the questions, those were written by Brandon Downey) asked 30 question evenly spread pitting e.g. Explorer against Socializer, so you ended up with a score that said e.g. you prefer Explorer 100% against any other.

Back when the test was relevant (around 2000?) there was lots of multiplayer games (MUDs) and so you could enter what MUDs you were playing after you got your score -- it was interesting to see the averages for each aspect matching up with type of MUD (e.g. PVE versus PVP versus purely social/RP).

I also tried to match the results against a volunteered MBTI: http://mud-dev.zer7.com/2001/8/20412/#post20412

I wrote a mini-thesis halfway through my masters in cognitive science. I used a 3D virtual environment (basically, a FPS video game) to study curiosity, learning, and knowledge graphs.

It was cool. I learned a lot.

I'm gonna do more.

Yes, but if you're limited in your choices in the game environment, what good is psychology?

For example, one of the questions:

Which is more enjoyable to you?

- Killing a big monster

- Bragging about it to your friends

Umm... neither? What is a 'monster'? Is it one of the last remaining megafauna, the rest having been slaughtered to extinction by other gamers? Is it a sentient creature (say, a dragon) that happens to be rather angry, but can be reasoned with?

What if I'd rather study the 'monster', like a zoologist might, in order to discover more about its life? (Do 'monsters' lead their own existence in a gaming world?)

There should be more to gaming than killing!

There is a lot more.

There is Animal Crossing

There are dress up games

Race games

Games that detail the high school lives of people

Fifa

Just to name a few

> my question was (and still is): why is a taxonomy the best way to capture this? In a personality research course it became clear to me that the biggest successful models are dimensional in nature (e.g. five factor model/big 5) they are not taxonomies.

The types are labels for the extremes of a dimensional analysis of motivation:

    INTEREST GRAPH

    Consider the following abstract graph:


                   ACTING
    Killers          |      Achievers
                     |
                     |
                     |
                     |
                     |
    PLAYERS ---------+--------- WORLD
                     |
                     |
                     |
                     |
                     |
    Socialisers      |      Explorers
                 INTERACTING

https://mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm

ed: much like archetypes in personality tests

The Bartle questionnaire really highlights the one-sidedness of game design!

In her book, You Just Don't Understand, Deborah Tannen highlights the differences between women and men: their inter-communication, and how they perceive the world.

"Women are also concerned with achieving status and avoiding failure, but these are not the goals they are focused on all the time, and they tend to pursue them in the guise of connection. And men are also concerned with achieving involvement and avoiding isolation, but they are not focused on these goals, and they tend to pursue them in the guise of opposition."

"If women speak and hear a language of connection and intimacy, while men speak and hear a language of status and independence, then communication between men and women can be like cross-cultural communication, prey to a clash of conversational styles. Instead of different dialects, it has been said they speak different genderlects."

And Ursula Le Guin also wrote about the vast gulf in reasoning and perception between men and women: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ursula-k-le-guin-the...

All I can say is, we need more women game designers... Balance!

I must be a terrible person because all that "women are like this, whereas men are like that" stuff strikes me as epically sexist and extremely shallow. The precise kind of reasoning that comes out in support of "women can't x" and "men are useless at y"

I've enjoyed Le Guin's stories. So maybe i shouldn't be so put off.

Usually what's meant is not that all men/women always are X, but there's a general tendency towards X. Disregarding such observations merely because they appear sexist is living in denial.

No way I agree with that at all.

s/sex/race/g see how you go with that.

s/sex/sexual preference/g likewise.

Those aren't arguments by any stretch they just highlight where too look.

There has always been really crappy, nasty arguments that people with characteristic X have a tendency to Y therefore we should/can/will be under-considered for being able to Z. To ignore that and the utterly false, pseudo-scientific garbage used in support really is living in denial. To go the other way and say the characteristics exist for a specific case/characteristic requires hard evidence that stands up to vigorous verification, for mine. I don't see that. I see pseudo-scientific garbage. Does that make me from Mars or Venus?

I agree we need to be careful with concluding “therefore we should/can/will be under-considered for being able to Z” because it’s easy to become ham fisted there.

But that doesn’t mean we should disregard a sound observation in itself. Yes, it may be politically incorrect, but it’s still real. For example:

s/sex/race/g Black people tend to commit crimes more often.

s/sex/sexual preference/g Transsexuals tend to commit suicide more often.

Both of these are statistically true. What matters is what you conclude. Should we just get rid of blacks and transsexuals? Or is there a root to these issues that we can work on?

Please Google "confounding factors."

I have no further wish to continue this conversation at all in any way. I have a general tendency that way.

> Please Google "confounding factors."

sigh That's exactly what I was saying in my last sentence.

You should take a minute to actually understand the post you're replying to. Especially if, as you almost figured out yourself, you have a general tendency to strawman and be snide about it.

>I must be a terrible person because all that "women are like this, whereas men are like that" stuff strikes me as epically sexist and extremely shallow.

Confounding factors are THE thing that make this kind of thing utter bullsht even if* there's data. But there isn't data.

Do you understand the point I made that you responded to now? I'll ignore the condescension in your response above because it's against the rules around here to respond to it other than by noting it.

So for the sake of the argument let's make up a utopian scenario "group X is Y, but it is so exclusively because of this clearly identified confounding factor Z".

It obviously doesn't follow that group X isn't Y anymore. It just means group X is Y and Z.

If someone says "let's accomodate group X by accomodating Y-ness", and you go and say that's shallow, X-ist, utter bullshit, then you are in denial that group X is Y.

> But there isn't data.

Is this denial again?

> condescension

Sorry, I acknowledge that I was needlessly being a dick. But don't get on the high horse over it. It was just in response to you needlessly being a dick.

This brings back memories. I was a huge fan of the old pkmud. It had gameplay that very much anticipated today's battle royales. The various players would get teleported randomly to locations in the DIKU MUD world and then scramble to kill MOBs and collect gear to better murder the other players. Looks like it's still around[1], and for some reason my handle is an illegal name. Fascinating! Sadly, like most MUDs, the player base is nonexistent.

Most of my time though was on a deeper SillyMUD derived PK MUD called Forbidden Lands. It was neat because the focus wasn't on murder, it was just an option. So the politics and mores around killing got quite interesting.

Edit: Still KASE.

[1] http://pkmud.net/

Never heard of this before, but it seems like it was a class-based Battle Royale created 25 years ago? Wow, that was way ahead of the times.

That's cool to know I'm a EASK (Explorer). It's just like Myers Briggs Personality test. I do lean more to exploring the virtual worlds and building things.

> It's just like Myers Briggs Personality test

Oof.

I have read the book a long time ago (around 2005 I think) but I remember one of the 4 player types was griefer which he said was the only category that wasn't useful to the virtual world and should be dealt with.

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