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Over the last five years
We've talked we've talked about a lot of foundational game design theory
But we still haven't even covered all the basics
In fact theres one piece of theory so old and so foundational,
That we never really thought to bring it up until now
Bartle's Taxonomy
This was one of the earliest attempts to break down
The psychology of players in a multi-player environment
To this day, we use it not only to better understand how we're meeting
Different types of players needs when we're crafting multi-player environments,
But also to asses just who we're aiming for as we build out single player games
But to understand Bartle's Taxonomy, we have to understand where it came from
Richard Bartle was one of the creators of the first MUD way back in 1978
For sixteen years he watched and studied players playing in group environments
Then in the mid-90s, just as MMORPGs were about to make their debut,
He released his theory on how to divide up players by what they wanted out of a multi-player game
Fascinatingly, this all sprang from a long discussion he'd had with high level players
He asked them a simple question:
"What do you want from this game?"
It was an imminently practical question, knowing what players wanted would help him decide how to develop a game
But interestingly enough, they couldn't agree
In fact, they disagreed violently
These players, all of whom had been playing the game for hundreds of hours,
Had actually been playing the game for radically different reasons
So Bartle tried to dig down to the root of some of their comments
To see if there were any commonalities
Any way he could group these, seemingly disparate players together
and in the end, he produced his taxonomy
It was clear to him that he couldn't look at his players as one single group any longer,
But he also, after much work
Discovered that they weren't just a thousand different voices all with completely different needs either
Rather they fell into four, distinct groups
He labeled them by playing card suits, but today we know them better as:
Acheivers, explorers, socialisers, and killers
Achievers are the players who play largely for the stated, in game goals
To beat a level, to get a high score, to win the game, to max their XP, or to collect the most gold
To encourage these types of players, designers create goals
Above and beyond what we expect the ordinary player to do
Things like a 100% completion mode,
Or a new game plus are designed to feed the needs of these particular players
And clearly the achievement systems, that are are now nearly ubiquitous in gaming
We originally designed to find a low cost way to further engage those players
They feel rewarded by anything that acknowledges their mastery of the game
Such as highscore lists, or leaderboards
Explorers are out for discovery,
For the joy of the new
Whether its understanding how esoteric aspects of the games system work,
Or finding places that no-one else has gotten to yet,
Thats why the explorer plays
The actual gameplay is just a tool to enable their exploration
They're not here to master the game,
They simply want to garner enough skill at it to be able to explore unimpeded
Easter eggs, hidden areas, layered systems or large amounts of non-aethstetic customization
These are the factors that draw explorers to a game
These players are particularly rewarded by the moments where they think of something intricate or complex to execute,
That should work within the game world but,
They think "oh surely not, there's no way they programmed that in"
Only to find out that the designers were just waiting for a player to try something that clever
Socializers like the interpersonal aspect of a game,
They're there for the community
You'll find these players trading, chatting in town, forming guilds
Or helping new players just for the fun of meeting a new person
In a single player environment, they tend to gravitate towards games that mimic some of those experiences
Tools that facilitate making social connections draw them to play
Of course the socializer landscape of gaming has changed a great deal since Bartle wrote this,
Now with Youtube and Twitch and the FAQ community,
There's actually a whole new meta-structure for socializers
There are Minecraft socializers and MOBA socializers, who participate more in the community out of game then in it
Then there's the killers
These are the players who are in game to assert dominance
Pure and simple
Most of the time this takes the form of causing misery to other players
Knowing someone on the other side of the wire is cursing in defeat
Is the highest thrill for most killers
This can take other forms though,
The guild leader who runs this town, the trader who corners the market on a good
So everybody who wants has to go through them
These too could be the killer player types, they're just playing parts of the game
That don't actually involve killing
The more that PvP allows for an expression of dominance,
The more these players enjoy it
That may include being able to spawn camp, or the ability to target players who are materially weaker
Any game system that allows them to taunt their prey
Now, some of this information is probably old hat for you,
But what's rad about Bartle's thinking, is that he didn't stop at these simple observations
He did something profound
He was able to generalize how game design affects each of these players,
In a simple and elegant graph
The graph has two axes,
One which goes from acting to interacting,
The other which goes from player to world
Acting, in this case, simply means to act upon
As opposed to interacting, which means to act with
And players refers to the other, actual people in the game,
As opposed to the world, which is the game itself
By viewing design in this sense, he could group player types by what they liked in a game in an elegant way
One that allows a designer to asses a new mechanic, system or dungeon they're adding to the game,
Even one that's radically new and untested, and figure out what type of play it will encourage
The four player types I described each map to one of the four quadrants of Bartle's chart
Achievers like acting on the world,
Explorers like interacting with the world,
Socializers like interacting with players,
And killers like acting on players
The beauty of this system is its utility
It reframes design questions in a much more useful way
Because questions like "is this mechanic good for explorers?"
Or "what will achievers think of this level"
Those questions are not only kind of nebulous and reductive,
But they force you to examine each group individually
Its far easier to instead, assess whether a change you've made to your game
Allows more interaction with the world, or more acting on the world
Consider where that change charts on the graph, and then consider what group that change will appeal most to
This all leads me to the thing I'm really excited to talk about,
How do you balance an MMO ecosystem so that you have the right mix of players
And so it doesn't all just fall apart
To answer that, well be diving into Bartle's work in depth here next week
See you then
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Dang subtitling is hard