Play-Persona: Modeling Player Behaviour in Computer Games

Crew actions schemas are:
• Squad command (shoot at, go there, follow me) directly influenced by both FPV2 and 3
• Individual command (ammo request, heal, select, shoot at, go there, follow me) clearly the
outcome of NPV1 and FPV3
Schemas, in this game, are layered as “basic” and “advanced”, meaning that beginners choosing a
low level of difficulty can successfully accomplish the missions making use solely of basic schemas.
Once players have acquired a sufficient level of familiarity with the game, they can start
experimenting with the different options they are given and eventually develop a favorite set of
play-gestalts to face the various game encounters and challenges. Play-gestalts are dynamically
defined every time a player selects among play-modes the actions that will guarantee his/her
progress in the game, for example:
• hold back the team in a covert position,
• sneak and flank the enemy,
• order a squad attack,
• attack from covert position in “over the shoulder” mode.
5 PLAY-STYLES
If players chose to negotiate game encounters through consistent, isotopic play-gestalts, they start
expressing a peculiar play-style. In the physical world the variations available to execute a task or
tell a story are nearly countless as shown for example by Queneau in “Zazie dans le metro” or
“Hundred Thousand Billion Poems” [9]. On the other hand in the game environment, even
accounting for the phenomenon of “emergence”, the possible interactions are much more limited
because game designers only include very small subsets of all the possible actions. Chomsky
acknowledged the importance of “infinite use of finite means” in his works on generative grammar
[2] and it shows how the expressive potential of the limited input is vital to gain a glimpse in the
player’s state of mind. It is possible then to read each action started by the player in the game
environment as the semiotic “unintentional sign” defined by Eco: “actions of an emitter, perceived
by a receiver as signifying artefacts” [3]. Due to the connotative layer, these signifying artefacts
may unconsciously reveal properties of the mental state and behaviour of the emitter. It pays off to
understand player’s actions as semiotics acts (unintentional signs) because play-styles point
towards more than just strategies to successfully complete the game. For example the functional
attributes of “bare handed close combat” (basic schema) and “armed close combat” (advanced
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