What's your player style?

In my recent article we saw what are the different learning styles according to the VARK model.

If you are also using gamification for training, you will see how interesting it is to understand how your trainees like to approach playing games.

The better you understand your players, the better you can meet their needs.

In 1996 Dr Richard Bartle is a British professor and game researcher published an article titled "Hearts, clubs, diamonds, spades: Players who suit MUDs" describing the approaches that may arise from the inter-relationship of two dimensions of playing style: action versus interaction, and world-oriented versus player-oriented. This article was the result of a research conducted on the types of people who played Multi User Dungeon (MUD) games, what they wanted, how they acted and how they interacted.

To discover your player's style you can take the Bartle Test of Psychology, which breaks up the way people play games into four simple categories. These categories are the Achiever, the Explorer, the Socializer, and the Killer. Of course these categories aren't rigid.

Later, Bartle expanded on this and created a more detailed model that included 8 types; Griefer, Networker, Politician, Friend, Opportunist, Scientist, Planner and Hacker as described here.

To keep the engagement high and launch a successful challenge, it is important to understand those types and take the needs into consideration while designing a game.

Let's have a closer look at the 4 main types:

• Achievers: Their goal is to accumulate status and points by winning the various battles within in the game; they tend to follow the game’s rules. They enjoy to earn points, to evolve the character, to acquire equipment and other concrete measures of success in the game.
• Explorers: They enjoy the game/learning journey. They want to discover the systems that govern the function of the game world, understand their technicalities and uniquenesses, and learn how to take advantage of them. They have the tendency to dig around, discovering areas, and immersing themselves in the game world without time limitations. They enjoy finding glitches or a hidden easter egg.
• Socializers: prefer to play online for social pleasure, to interact with other players and to naturally evolve the character. They want to form connections with other players by telling stories, sharing tactics, and working together within the game. They love interacting also with computer-controlled characters with personality.
• Killers: These are the hackers who want to watch the world burn. Also known as the ones who live to see chaos, and they don’t tend to be too considerate of other players’ experience as long as they win in the end. Defeating bosses, raiding other players, and even figuring out bugs that let them take further control of the game is the goal. They are interested in competing against other players or against enemies that are more powerful and complex. They don’t tend to be the most lucrative players or the best members of the community.

How is the relationship among these types of players?

The relationship is not always great: for example, the killer behavior does not relate well to the socializer, and this indicates that the presence of many types of this player inhibits the existence of the other, and for this reason such table is not symmetrical.

For this reason it is important to increase the number and diversity of players as well outlined in this article.

If you would like to discover more about the other subtypes, have a look at this article.

I took the test and I am an EASK... 80% Explorer; 53% Achiever; 47% Socialiser; 20% Killer

What Bartle says about me:

Explorers delight in having the game expose its internal machinations to them. They try progressively esoteric actions in wild, out-of-the-way places, looking for interesting features (ie. bugs) and figuring out how things work. Scoring points may be necessary to enter some next phase of exploration, but it's tedious, and anyone with half a brain can do it. Killing is quicker, and might be a constructive exercise in its own right, but it causes too much hassle in the long run if the deceased return to seek retribution. Socialising can be informative as a source of new ideas to try out, but most of what people say is irrelevant or old hat. The real fun comes only from discovery, and making the most complete set of maps in existence.

Did you know that there could also be a correspondence between your MBTI type and your Bartle player type? You can read more about this correlation here.

Which type of player are you? Take the test and share your results in the comments.