What Play Style Do You Prefer?
International Hobo – DGD1 Questionnaire – What Play Style Do You Prefer? is a little research quiz designed to help them refine the player audience model. Spotted over at Only a Game, Chris Bateman’s blog.
I came out as
- Marginally Type 1 Conqueror
- Strongly Type 2 Manager
- Dominantly Type 3 Wanderer
- Strongly Type 4 Participant
Just yesterday, a co-worker handed me Chris’ book, 21st Century Game Design, and so far it’s quite good, though I haven’t gotten past the initial section on audience modeling yet. I expect to have more quarrels with it once I get to the sections that about actually modeling game structures, since we’ve had some disagreements in the past on his blog.
The disagreements are all of a highly theoretical nature, however, and the interesting thing about this book so far is how practical it is. Based on what I have read so far, I very much recommend it.
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The structural elements of the book are as practical as the audience parts, though the audience modeling theory has IMO a much longer shelf-life for usefulness than the structral chapters, which seem to cover only what’s been produced.
Of course, I personally take issue with the idea that “structure” is an essentail component of a game’s design, in fact I think a resistance towards adapting post-structural theories is why we don’t yet have a robust game design notation.
I phrased something above badly. My co-worker handed me a copy of the book given her by Chris for me, because they happened to bump into each other at a conference.
So thanks, Chris!
The concept of linking the myers briggs personality test into play style is a potentially useful idea.
The play styles listed in the book seem reasonable.
The book didn’t show enough (or any) data though. This bothered me, because the book implies you can go from myers-briggs, to play style, to genre/design…
However, there’s no/little correlation to my personal myers-briggs personality (as I guestimate it) and the the types of games I like to play. This implies I’m a statistical anomaly, which could easily be correct. But then, the book’s claims are no longer “intuitive” and “obvious” to me, so I’d like to see the data backing them up.
The larger concept is more relvent… (Note: Below is my complete and total distortion about the fundamental issue that the book was discussing.)
Basically, a game has a set of “features”. Those features are enjoyed by certain personality “dimensions” (Myers Briggs has 4 dimensions). Realistically, there could be thousands of dimensions, including stuff like “Has anime-style characters.” and “Uses a Jazz-based sound track.”
Every person has a preference for these dimensions, also a vector. Example: Some people are more intuitive, more extroverted, etc. Some people prefer Rock sound tracks to Jazz.
Taking the dot product of the app’s features with the person’s preference returns a score. Positive means the player likes the game, negative implies dislike.
The more players that have positive dot products with the game’s features, the more succesful the game… except…
The values (per dimension) in an indvidual person’s vector are NOT independent. There’s a correlation between many of them. For example: People that like Jazz are more likely to like Disney-style animations as opposed to anime animations (or whatever).
To make a succesful game, the game must take into account (a) the fact that dimensions are correlated (people who like Jazz like Disney characters), and (b) that (in general) more people like Rock than like Jazz. (So, the most successful game will have a Rock sound track with anime characters. However, if you are going to use a Jazz sound track, you should make sure to use Disney characters. A game with a Jazz sound track AND anime characters makes no one happy and will be a failure.)
The book also points out that casual players (a much larger market than the hard core) get a lot of their information about a game from hard core gamers. Unfortunately, hard core gamers have different feature-likes than casual gamers. So, the game must do some extra contortions to be like by both hard core and casual players. It’s not unlike republican presidential candidates being very conservative when they’re trying to win the republican nomination, but then suddenly shifting towards center in order to win the national election.
I rate:
Not Significantly Type 1 Conqueror
Moderately Type 2 Manager
Dominantly Type 3 Wanderer
Moderately Type 4 Participant
Having read both the book and the original ihobo article, I’d say that his test doesn’t do a very good job of reflecting preferences — not sufficiently granular, I think.
I’m a Myers-Briggs INTJ, and I’d describe myself as leaning fairly heavily towards Conqueror tendencies (as expected for an INTJ) — but I’m interested in exploring and learning fairly thoroughly, even if I don’t “win” in the traditional sense of the word. (And I am a Bartle-type Explorer.)
This conversation is a little more learned than I am. Mostly, my expertise comes from playing games, rather than creating them… I guess you could say that I’ve become a good judge of characters 😛
Here is me,
Moderately Type 1 Conqueror
Moderately Type 2 Manager
Moderately Type 3 Wanderer
Dominantly Type 4 Participant
Ok, I know this may be out of line, but as favor to some one who really cares, Raph can you please pass this along to some one as SOE, A Guilds Worth of Game Play Issues – Since the Combat Upgrade. It’s a heartfelt list of everything that has gone wrong for at least 200 people who loved your game, SWG… They’re gone… and I just don’t think they’ll ever come back…
/salute
Moderately Type 1 Conqueror
Moderately Type 2 Manager
Strongly Type 3 Wanderer
Moderately Type 4 Participant
Um, well, that doesn’t really surprise me at all. I’m a Bartle Explorer type, and a Myers-Briggs ENTP (Perceivers loooooove open-ended stuff). Part of why Starflight was one of my favorite games of all time is because I really never knew what the hell I’d find out there in the vastness of space. Heck, I didn’t even know how to win the game, but, damn, was I having fun just looking around.
No problem Raph! Hope you enjoy it.
Mike:
There’s not much data presented because I don’t consider our research to be of a particularly rigorous nature, hence my repeated insistence that more research is needed. (Tables of data gathered is all we could have shown, and that would be pretty dull reading).
I certainly don’t want to suggest that you can take someone’s Myers-Briggs Type and convert directly to play style as a matter of course – although I am suggesting a broad statistical correlation (which is what we found). Myers-Briggs typology is about observing certain trends in behaviour and response, as you say; what we saw were correlations with these axes and play but – and this is critical – not necessarily between a person’s preferential type in Myers-Briggs and their preferred play styles. (There are more issues than just this, but this isn’t the place to dig into the theoretical side of it all).
The only reason I think our work on this is interesting is that it underlines one key point: that people play games in different ways. That’s the message. The DGD1 model is effectively disposable, but the idea that people approach play in fundamentally different ways warrants more research, I believe.
I never present anything as Truth, just as food for thought; this is the spirit that I hope our work will be taken in.
Take care!
Moderately Type 1 Conqueror
Moderately Type 2 Manager
Moderately Type 3 Wanderer
Dominantly Type 4 Participant
I’m kind of surprised that I’m only moderately type 2, but then I wouldn’t really want to manage other people heh.
Moderately Type 1 Conqueror
Strongly Type 2 Manager
Dominantly Type 3 Wanderer
Marginally Type 4 Participant
This basically fits what I though I was, except the participant is a little on the low side. I guess I’d like to be a participant, but my hearts not really in it. I have given up trying to classify myself in the Bartle types, and instead think of myself is primarily motivated by immersion, as described in Dave Rickey’s theory.
Chris wrote:
How strong of a statistical correlation is what interests me.
I just realized I forgot to mention this in my post, perhaps because it’s an “obvious” assumption of virtual worlds that players approach the world in different ways.
Which, I suppose, is why finding a strong correlation to a personality test would be useful. If a game designer knows that INTJ personalities statistically like feature X (Jazz music, to continue my intentionally bizarre examples from yesterday), and the designer finds a way to put a personality test into the game (the mountain climber vs. hiker question you mention in your book), then the game can better tailor itself to the player.
Strongly Type 1 Conqueror
Strongly Type 2 Manager
Moderately Type 3 Wanderer
Moderately Type 4 Participant
I found it pretty accurate for me, and one of my friends chimed positive on accuracy, too.
Moderately Type 1 Conqueror
Strongly Type 2 Manager
Strongly Type 3 Wanderer
Strongly Type 4 Participant
/em scurries off to order the book and learn more.
I liked this playstyle alot Raph 🙂
http://media2.yahoo.com/player/games/?k=/genre/roleplaying/starwarsgalaxiesaned/6023592
PS: Give Haden and Vogel a big heartfelt thanks as well…..
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