[MUD-Dev] wherefor in-game artists?

[Richard A. Bartle]

On 03 September 2004, Sean Howard wrote:

> The problem with your player types is that you describe results,
> rather than motivations.

The player types apply to motivation, but are very difficult to
ascertain other than by looking at results. Although most of the
time there is a correspondence between action and motivation,
occasionally there is not. A classic example from my own experience
would be a character we had who for 99% of the time was the world's
best socialiser. She would spend hours teaching people how to play,
coming to their aid if they got into difficulties, and chatting
(very wittily) as the world passed her by. The remaining 1% of the
time, she was a pure killer. Actually, 100% of the time she was a
killer, it's just that she spent 99% of her time gaining the
confidence of potential victims until the moment was perfect to
strike.

So it's possible for a character to appear through action to be one
type while being motivated to behave that way reveals them to be
another.  Whether this kind of thing evens itself out or not I don't
know; I'm fairly sure that among long-term players at least it's
statistically significant.  Naturally, however, I have no formal
evidence for this...

> The only way those four types become of any use at all is by
> making them all viable, just to different degrees.

I'm not sure what you mean by "viable" here.

The player types tell you why people play. You can decide which
types to promote or demote on that basis. Then again, you can ignore
the whole player types model if you like, it's not mandatory! The
important thing about the player types model is that it gives people
cause to look at the different motivations that players have in
virtual worlds, and account for them in their virtual world's
design. Whether designers like my particular model or not doesn't
particularly matter; what's important is that they consider that
there are different reasons that people have for their actions in
virtual worlds, and that their world's design needs to address these
reasons.

> In this case, it can't be used to describe the motivations of
> people described as creators.

Well no, of course not. People create for different reasons, and if
I were to say that creation (whether in-context through crafting or
out-of-context through building privs) is an activity primarily
associated with, say, exploring, you could come right back at me and
give me examples of its use by achievers, killers and socialisers.

You may also be able to point at creation as being none of these
things. It could be some kind of artistic journey of self-expression
that is independent of the virtual world except that this is the
medium in which the art takes place. In that case, I'd say fine,
that's a real-world motivation (in the same way that people who play
to make money eBaying stuff have real-world motivation). I could
argue that the reason people create (in this sense) is the same as
the reason that people play in general (ie. to find themselves), but
I wouldn't want to fit them into the player types model
directly. It's a model of player types; if people aren't playing,
then the model doesn't apply to them. I'm not trying to create an
all-encompassing model for human psychology here, just something
that will help designers design better virtual worlds.

> Worse yet, it cannot predict future behavior or how certain types
> will respond to new and unseen game features.

The original 4-types model can't be used predictively like that,
you're right. The 8-type model that I outline in my book can,
however.

As for predicting how the player types will respond to new and
unseen game features, I think even the 4-player model is pretty good
at that. There may be other influences, eg. cultural ones, but in
general it's not all that hard to predict what will happen in an
individual virtual world if you know that virtual world well enough.

> A motivation based description is much more accurate and useful
> for matters of design and understanding players.

The player types model IS motivational. The question that prompted
its development was "What do people want out of a MUD?", not "What
do people do when playing a MUD?".

Richard
_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
https://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev