[MUD-Dev] wherefor in-game artists?

[David Kennerly]

Sean Howard wrote:
> "Richard A. Bartle" <richard at mud.co.uk> wrote:
>> On 01 September 2004, Paolo Piselli wrote:

>>> Where, if anywhere, do creative types fall in Bartle's player
>>> types

>> It depends why they are creating. It's possible to conceive of
>> people creating for reasons that fit into any of the player
>> types.

> The problem with your player types is that you describe results,
> rather than motivations. People can have the same effective
> behaviors but for very different reasons.

I think all four can be, too, but, for an odd, or at least
long-winded reason, which is based on semi-motivation model.

I have had a curiosity with Bartle types that led to a weird
opinion.  I failed overcome the laziness, so have not disproven my
faulty opinion.  Certainly not enough to study of psychology.
Instead, maybe I can just find a psychologist to beat it out of my
head with much less work.  :)

My curiosity began with the title: "Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades:
Players Who Suit MUDs" (http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm).
These, of course, are four suits of cards.  These four suits of
playing cards were derived from the four suits of the Tarot deck.
Correspondences being:

  Tarot :: Suit
  Cups :: Hearts
  Wands :: Clubs
  Disks :: Diamonds
  Swords :: Spades

The Tarot deck was, among many things, a lexicon of medieval
alchemy.  These alchemists studied how to transform a leaden
personality into a golden personality.  That is, how to adjust the
four elements in the persona, or the three alchemical essences of
Sulphur, Salt, and Mercury, in order to change their motivation and
improve character.  Turn lead into gold, or as Foucault might call
it, the technologies of the self.

Some alchemy included a theory of personal relationships, in which
the ancient four elements were ascribed correspondences to
personality types.  These alchemical elementary personalities are:

  Element :: Alchemical personality
  Water :: Entertaining and emotionally subtle.
  Fire :: Energetic and party-loving and emotionally dominant.
  Earth :: Traditional, and intellectually subtle.
  Air :: Investigative, thought-provocative, and intellectually dominant.

There is also a correspondence from the elements to the Greek Gods,
which the Greeks believed were origins of mortal personality.  A
Greek might say Apollo speaks through me, etc.

  Element :: Greek god
  Water :: Apollo
  Fire :: Dionysus
  Earth :: Epimetheus
  Air :: Prometheus

Which gives the correspondence to personality as:

  Greek god :: Alchemical personality
  Apollo :: Entertaining and emotionally subtle.
  Dionysus :: Energetic and party-loving and emotionally dominant.
  Epimetheus :: Traditional, and intellectually subtle.
  Prometheus :: Investigative, thought-provocative, and intellectually dominant.

Much of their utility comes in seeing how various elements interact,
as tendencies for social and/or sexual chemistry.  These were
encoded into the Tarot deck, which gives us three columns of
correspondences:

  Element :: Tarot :: Suit :: Greek god
  Water :: Cups :: Hearts :: Apollo
  Fire :: Wands :: Clubs :: Dionysus
  Earth :: Disks :: Diamonds :: Epimetheus
  Air :: Swords :: Spades :: Prometheus

Carl Jung studied alchemy.  From them he refined some proposals of
personality attitudes and functions.  From Jung, Myers-Briggs based
the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), which retains some
correspondences from alchemical elements:

  Element :: Myers-Briggs (MBTI)
  Water :: Intuitive-Feeling (NF)
  Fire :: Sensing-Perceiving (SP)
  Earth :: Sensing-Judging (SJ)
  Air :: Intuitive-Thinking (NT)

Keirsey (http://www.keirsey.com/) designated four temperaments of
the sixteen in MBTI.  These corresponsences continue:

  Element :: Myers-Briggs (MBTI) :: Keirsey
  Water :: Intuitive-Feeling :: Idealists
  Fire :: Sensing-Perceiving :: Artisans
  Earth :: Sensing-Judging :: Guardians
  Air :: Intuitive-Thinking :: Rationals

By knowing the origin and the original meaning of the tarot to the suit of a
playing card, one may further correspond the tarot to the MBTI:

  Element :: Tarot :: MBTI :: Suit
  Water :: Cups :: NF :: Hearts
  Fire :: Wands :: SP :: Clubs
  Earth :: Disks :: SJ :: Diamonds
  Air :: Swords :: NT :: Spades

Rearranging suits to alchemical personality thus:

  Suit :: Alchemical personality
  Hearts :: Entertaining and emotionally subtle.
  Clubs :: Energetic and party-loving and emotionally dominant.
  Diamonds :: Traditional, and intellectually subtle.
  Spades :: Investigative, thought-provocative, and intellectually dominant.

This then is not a far cry from a correspondence between Bartle
types and personalities:

  Bartle :: Alchemical personality
  Socializers :: Entertaining and emotionally subtle.
  Killers :: Energetic and party-loving and emotionally dominant.
  Achievers :: Traditional, and intellectually subtle.
  Explorers :: Investigative, thought-provocative, and intellectually dominant.

So, this would imply the following correspondences:

  MBTI :: Bartle
  NF :: Socializer
  SP :: Killer
  SJ :: Achiever
  NT :: Explorer

A few years ago, I asked Erwin Andreasen about this correspondence
(http://www.kanga.nu/archives/MUD-Dev-L/2001Q3/msg00794.php).  He
tabulated several results from an informal quiz on a Bartle Quotient
(http://www.andreasen.org/bartle/nstats.cgi).  Aggregating these
four temperaments and doing correspondences yields:

  MBTI    Total    Achvr    Kllr    Explrr    Sclzr
    NF     34%      27%      24%      31%      46%
    SP     08%      09%      10%      07%      08%
    SJ     13%      17%      15%      12%      12%
    NT     45%      47%      51%      50%      35%
   Sum    100%     100%     100%     100%     100%

Normalizing from the total in each Myers-Briggs Type, we see the
modal correspondences are:

  MBTI :: Bartle
  NF :: Socializer (1.36)
  SP :: Killer (1.29)
  SJ :: Achiever (1.31)
  NT :: Killer (1.12), Explorer (1.09)

The correspondence suggests isomorphism, except for the NT
temperament, Rationals.  All but one match, and the one that does
not is the least statistically significant, it is a difference of
1%.  This shows bias in my opinion, the self-selected respondents,
or the mapping of the questions.  Probably my opinion.

A couple other interesting third conjecture comes to mind.  That is
that being online, which is dominated by NT in this test (46% !),
which has a tendency for intellectual domination, could express this
through cleverness online, which the test might detect any form of
domination as killer tendency.  Another is that some players may
have a tendency to embody a separate online personality than
offline.  And another conjecture is that killers have more fun (Amy
Jo Kim).

The conclusion of this weird belief, is my tendency to substitute
(NT, SJ, NF, SP) instead of (E, A, S, K), since I'm more familiar
with its use, history, and the relationships between MBTI
personalities.  Of course, any stone, with enough stock, can be
turned into soup.  I'm just pitching one more pebble in.  :)

All that was a long-winding road to get to an answer of the question
"wherefor in-game artists?": Therefore, a player could create art to
entertain, dominate, trade, or provoke.

That's all in theory.  In practice, I'm not sure what the
distribution of artist personalities are in a computer-mediated
community.  I haven't encountered evidence to disprove the opinion,
but haven't encountered evidence to prove it either.  In editing a
library of player art and literature
(http://www.darkages.com/community/body_library.html), I felt that
various artists were doing it for different reasons and that their
art, or literature, was intended to have these different effects:
entertainment, domination, trade, provoke.

David
(INTP, SEA)
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