Try this one: http://www.seankreynolds.com/rpgfiles/gaming/BreakdownOfRPGPlayers.html (and feel free to edit the old link).

Just as you don’t see many books on how to write a great song — as a musician myself I find that notion absurd – you also don’t see many books that try to deconstruct the underpinnings of what “fun” is. Even if you disagree with him, we should give Raph top marks for at least having the courage to tackle this subject which has had the end result in provoking thought and discussion.

I highly recommend his book to any aspiring game designers trying to break into the industry. The knowledge and theories inside the book helped to give me confidence when I discussed concepts like fun and challenge during the interview that landed my first job. I am better game designer because of his book.

Tadhg Kelly’s comment makes me go “whut?”

Bryant’s link makes me sad because it doesn’t seem to go to the results he talks about.

Nicole’s link is really interesting stuff and I’m very appreciative that she dropped in to add it.

The reason I suspect so is that this is something that I’ve come across repeatedly in the last while, which is the unwillingness of developers (and designers in particular) to really break down their work into functioning fundamental parts. There’s a real urge among many to stick to an idea of inapproachable complexity rather than elegance, and it’s an emotional rather than rational argument. The designer doesn’t want to brooch the idea that the things that he works on are not in fact unique snowflakes, but are instead part of a set.

This is, I think, self-destructive behaviour. It’s an attempt to cast creativity as a complex but solvable problem rather than a simple foundational one because in doing so the designer gets to not face up to an awful truth: Good games, like good everything else, are based on creative talent first and foremost.

Making MMO’s is not complicated in the way of analysing thousands of player emotions and motivations through a blizzard of spreadsheets and studies. MMOs are generally pretty simple to understand, as are their motivations. What’s hard is coming up with a good idea, a fresh take, a new genre, an exciting spin, an elegant mechanic, all that sort of stuff. The stuff that doesn’t fall out of a model or a study much which captures the essential magic of the thing.

Raph’s theory is so terrifying to game designers because what it actually says (and a few other theories like it) is that games are actually pretty simple, and that leaves them nowhere to hide. If the model of games is understood at least as a reasonable sarting point (and no model of any artform is ever 100% applicable – see Syd Field) then the focus is not the designer: He knows what the ground rules are. Now he has to actually have an idea. An original idea. And make it work.

My 17 years of research indicates that there are 4 primary playstyles that cross all games. We analyzed player’s favorite moments in games, everything from Tetris to Halo to WOW and measured the emotions in players’ faces and bodies. We simplified Paul Ekman’s FACs coding to collect emotions directly from the player so they did not have to remember them in a survey post-game.

Grouping these observations we discovered two striking relationships between emotions (where enjoyment and motivation come from) and player choices offered by the game mechanic:

1. Player emotions connect with each other and have prerequisites (Frustration and Fiero, or Curiosity and Surprise)
2. Game mechanics associated with each group of player emotions created a playstyle

We call these the 4 Keys and best selling games tend to have at least 3 out of the 4 playstyles. By watching actual players at home/school/work we also found that players actually rotate between 3 out of the 4 styles within a 20 minute session. They don’t just choose one play style as Bartle and Yee’s research implies.

There are many ways to enjoy games
1. Hard Fun of challenge and mastery uses goals, obsticals, and strategies to balance player frustration with Fiero (Italian for personal triumph over adversity)
2. Easy Fun of experimentation and role play where the core fantasy and balance between novelty and the expected inspires the imagination creating curiosity, surprise, and wonder.
3. Serious Fun from visceral stimuli and value based play where players game to change how they think, feel, and behave.
4. People Fun from spending time with friends where social emotions such as schadenfreude, amusement, naches, and gratitude.

The similarity between Bartle’s taxonomy, Nick Yee’s Deadalus Project, and the 4 Keys indicates that we are getting closer to understanding what makes games fun.

For those interested:
Free white papers and presentations slides available here: http://xeodesign.com/whyweplaygames

I’ll be talking about how to use these to use emotion to create viral distribution of games this year at GDC

https://cmpevents.com/GD09/a.asp?option=C&V=11&SessID=8674

Game On!

\o/
Nicole Lazzaro
XEODesign

1. “It boils down to the First Question: who is this game for, and why?”

Yes. I agree completely.

If you want other people’s money, you have to give them what they want. But how do you know what they want unless you know who your intended customers are? And even if you figure that out, how do you translate it into specific game features if you don’t know why they want what they want?

“Know your customer” doesn’t guarantee success. You still have to deliver. But it has to improve the odds.

This is why I’ve spent the past few years yapping about “player-centric design” as a general goal, and discussing in detail multiple “theories of fun” — i.e., playstyles and player motivations. Having workable theories of fun is highly desirable because they boost the odds of making a game that a commercially viable number of people will want to play.

So I’m with you completely on this.

After this… not quite as much. :)

2. Obviously Raph can speak for himself, but I think you might be taking that word “learning” more literally than it was intended.

I need to go back and re-read my copy of ATOF, but as I recall it, my impression was that Raph wasn’t using the word in a strict formal sense meaning deliberate pedagogy — ATOF seemed to be more about the process of becoming more sophisticated about games generally. I thought Raph was talking about learning in the same sense of someone learning about art by experiencing art, all kinds of art, in all kinds of ways. With more experience comes greater understanding of what makes one thing work while another doesn’t… and that’s half the foundation of game design. (Namely, the critical half, the other necessary half being the creative gift.)

If that reading of the term “learning” is close to what Raph intended in ATOF, then maybe it’s not such a bad thing that lots of game designers are checking it out. Is the process of becoming more knowledgeable about games, of developing a critical language, really something that deserves scorn?

Or is this more a complaint about laziness, and a concern that mindlessly racing to implement a naive understanding of Raph’s book will lead to a bunch of games with some cheesy form of “learning” as their core gameplay? If so, I’m with you on that… but then who’s to blame? Raph for not spelling things out even more carefully than he did? Or game designers looking for easy gimmicks to avoid hard creative thought?

3. On the specific question of player motivations (i.e., what are they, and which ones are least bogus), the dueling models of Nick Yee and Richard Bartle have been a point of contention for years. Even the two principals have publicly discussed their differences of opinion regarding their respective theories of player motivation. (See http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2007/10/the-hidden-bart.html and http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/001298.php?page=2 .)

Bottom line summary from my perspective: Richard holds that Nick’s multi-motivation model can have value but needs to show utility, while Nick asserts that Richard’s “player types” model is broken because he — Nick — is unwilling to accept the possibility that individuals can consistently prefer and exercise one motivation much more strongly than others… in other words, that people can have a “type.”

The good news is that, unlike lame theories of behavior such as astrology and enneagrams that start with a theory and go trolling for only the data that appear to support that theory, both Nick’s and Richard’s models of gamer behavior start with behavioral data and then propose theoretical models that try to show patterns in that data. That means both Nick’s and Richard’s models potentially have explanatory and predictive utility… and I believe both do.

Neither is flawless. Nick’s data come from self-selected responses to questions whose phrasing biases the results. Richard’s data come from close observation over many years of gamers and what they actually do in games, which opens up his data to charges of subjectivity.

But because both models at least start with data, and then try honorably to find a model that adequately encompasses that data, both (I believe) can have value. Both ways of understanding gamers can be useful to game designers. (Please note that this is not an “all models have equal validity” navel-gazing statement. All models purporting to explain and predict human behavior don’t have equal validity; some — as noted above — are complete crap. Nick’s and Richard’s models happen IMO not to be crap, and that starts with their being derived from data, not the other way around.)

Personally, while I’ve found Nick’s model useful, I’ve gotten more value from Richard’s original four-type model. Bearing in mind that nobody is ever “just one thing” forever, most people do seem to prefer one motivation over another at least a good chunk of the time. (I suspect there’s a deeper isomorphism here between Richard’s model, Nicole Lazzaro’s “keys,” Caillois’s forms of play, and David Keirsey’s general theory of temperament. I explore that notion at http://flatfingers-theory.blogspot.com/2005/01/styles-of-play-full-chart.html .)

At any rate, to the extent that individual players do reliably demonstrate particular playstyle preferences in games, I think Richard’s model is a reasonable basis for designing the content of those games.

It’s maybe not THE answer to the First Question, but, like Raph’s book, it’s AN answer we can use while we grope toward something even better.