Play-Persona: Modeling Player Behaviour in Computer Games

6 PLAY-PERSONAS
When a player behaves consistently in the game and maintains a defined play-style for longer
periods (if not for the whole game altogether) then he/she identifies completely with a certain
profile. I am going to call these consistent profiles “playing personas”. In spite of the fact that
players tend to switch styles extremely easily, it is clear that the designers themselves acknowledge
the possibility to play out personas. For example in the game “Hitman: Blood Money” [4] players
are given special rewards for completing missions following certain set rules (only killing the
assigned targets and getting out with the suit). Those rules restrain the in-game behaviour to a
specific style that maintained long enough gives birth to the play-persona called “Silent Assassin”.
Play-personas are constructs that share many similarities with Weber’s ideal types.
“An ideal type is formed by the one-sided accentuation of one or more points of view and by the
synthesis of a great many diffuse, discrete, more or less present and occasionally absent concrete
individual phenomena, which are arranged according to those one-sidedly emphasized viewpoints
into a unified analytical construct”. [12].
For Weber the ideal type is a conceptually pure mental construct used to monitor the behaviour of
social groups. It is totally theoretic, almost fictitious and generally not empirically found anywhere
in reality, but in our case it can prove to be a priceless tool to measure play-behaviours. Ideal types
are used as some sort of unit of measure, standards much like "meter", "second" or "kilogram" not
really found in nature, but useful to measure it.
Ultimately are those mental models that players refer to when they report “I totally pulled a Rambo
there to pass through the blockade” and it is up to the designers to plan and provide diverse,
engaging, satisfactory and at the same time consistent play-personas.
7 CONCLUSIONS
Each one of the four stages of the “scaffolding for experiencing” can lead to increased player
satisfaction and more focused and consistent design. Although the designers were almost always
aware of the concepts and cognizant of their meaning, they were only occasionally found in the
documentation or utilized in internal communications. Nevertheless their existence and relevance
has been proven during direct interviews with testers.
Clear improvement can be gained just by becoming aware of mechanisms that already are present
in the back of the mind of the designers, artists and scripters.
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