Reflections on Player Typographies
A few really good points were brought up Assignment 4 that I’d like to call to everyone’s attention.
Oscar probably hit on it most astutely in noting that there are a couple of players types Bartle doesn’t cover. Oscar points out the group of Collectors (people who just like to collect stuff for the sake of collection). Also, there seem to be two kinds of Explorers emerging…some of you pointed out that you didn’t exactly fit his definition, which is more of a cartographer or someone who analyzes the property of the world, as opposed to someone who is more interested in sightseeing and discovering new places. Another category that came up and which we discussed at length on Monday is the Helper type. Lara and others have also made comments that suggest we may want to think about different categories of Socializers-the ones who, who like Shon, think of this in terms of status, respect, loyalty, etc, and those who, as Lara puts it “just want to hang out.” These are very distinct social styles. She also makes an excellent point supported by others that many games tend to favor a certain play style, and that it’s better if the design weights each play style equally.
Let’s think about possibly breaking down Bartle’s definitions into more refined sub-sets, but I think in particular looking at a range of Socializer types would be particularly useful as you move forward on your game designs.