[MUD-Dev] DGN: Reasons for play [was: Emergent Behaviors spawnedfrom...]

[Richard A. Bartle]

On 04 August 2005, Paolo Piselli wrote:

> To be fair, Bartle's research didn't box people into each of the
> four behavioral types, it scored people with respect to each of
> the four behavioral types.

No, my theory DOES box people. That scoring system used by the
"Bartle Quotient" site (http://www.andreasen.org/bartle/) isn't
mine.

My theory says that when people play virtual worlds for fun, what
they believe to be fun is different for different people and changes
over time. If you're an achiever, then on the whole you will be
doing things in order to improve your character and its status. It
may be you do some socialising in "down time", which would suggest
you were on your way to becoming a socialiser, but you're still
basically an achiever (and my larger theory predicts the change to
socialiser anyway).

> People have subsequently drawn conceptual lines based on what a
> player's maximal score is.

Well, those people are wrong (as, of course, are those who think
players have a "score" anyway).

As a very loose analogy, you can think of my player types as being a
"seven ages of man" kind of thing. Some people remain "children" for
longer, and some "old" people occasionally do things that "young"
people do, but on the whole most people are going to be in one age
category, working towards the next one.

When you look at it this way, the question is not whether people can
or should be put in boxes or not, but whether you get anything
useful as a result.

My player types theory is of help to designers. It may not be much
help, but it's all we have at the moment insofar as theories go. I'm
going to be ecstatic when a theory comes along that finally replaces
it, but people seem to find it easier to publish papers criticising
my theory (usually from a flawed perspective) than they do creating
new theories. Take Nick Yee's work and use it to develop a model you
can use predictively and usefully for virtual world development,
then we'll all be better off.

Richard
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