Play-Persona: Modeling Player Behaviour in Computer Games

types" [12]. Personas are constructs that players build to unify their own actions and to make
sense of them. It is the player’s implied narrative tool. When a player refers his/her own
adventures during a game encounter it often reads: “… and then I did this and then this
happened”, etc… it is clear that this “I” is not the player him/herself but a role that he/she is
playing. If players tell themselves these stories, why can’t designers plan and create games that
accommodate for a (consistent) variety of them?
Summarizing the four-layered structure of the game-scaffolding: play-values, the first layer, inform
and inspire the inception of the second layer (gestalts, schemas and modes), the second layer
articulates into play-styles (third layer) and, if maintained consistently enough, they eventually
coalesce as play-personas (fourth layer). It is my purpose to show how designing around play-
personas allows players to express themselves, their individuality and their personality even within
the boundaries of fairly linear games, hence negating the necessity of asset redundancy, multiple
paths, branching or resource-intensive adaptive technology.
2 PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS
The initial step of the research was to investigate whether the developers at IO Interactive
responsible for the game and level design were already making use of the concepts listed above,
even unconsciously. Obviously the main goal was to check if these terms (or synonyms of the
terms) were playing a significant role in the communication between designers, artists,
programmers and level-scripters. In order to gather this kind of information, I utilized written game
design documentation, direct interviews (DI), and audio recordings of internal review meetings.
Armed with this data, I could make assumptions regarding the overall design of the game as a
system, and on a smaller scale, to see if they influenced the functional and artistic development of
the game levels.
Secondly it was very interesting for me to try to identify the four layers of the scaffolding in a game
currently under development at IOI, independently of whether the designers made conscious use of
the terms or not. I reviewed material at very different stages: from the earliest game concept to
the finished documentation, from first playable prototypes to the finished game with the purpose of
charting the evolution of the scaffolding and its implications for the final product.
The game I chose to investigate was Kane & Lynch [5]; a team-based third person action game
with strong narrative elements involving a flawed mercenary and a medicated psychopath. It is
going to be released in the fourth quarter of 2007; this implies that the timing for this research is
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