Play-Persona: Modeling Player Behaviour in Computer Games

ARTICLE 4 - WEAVING EXPERIENCES IN VIRTUAL WORLDS:
PLAY PERSONAS AND GAME METRICS
Article featured in “FLUX” a Danish Design School publication.
“A game's value proposition is how it makes its players think and feel. Players don’t buy games,
they buy experiences” [Nicole Lazzaro – XEO Design]
“Designers will transform from being designers of “stuff” to being the builders of scaffolds for
experiencing.” [Elizabeth Sanders - MakeTools]
“When you can measure what you are speaking about and when you can express it in numbers you
know something about it” [Lord Kelvin]
1 Introduction
People leave trails. Books borrowed at the library, websites visited while browsing the net, owning
a house, working as a middle manager, vacationing in Southeast Asia. Whether we drive a car, a
motorcycle or a rickshaw. Almost any action we take in the public space can represent a syllable of
a longer sentence that contributes in composing the narrative of our life. Reading some sort of
meaning in our actions is everything but a trivial semiotic effort. Nevertheless the number of
messages and products that attempt to take advantage of this disseminated knowledge is
increasing drastically: websites aware of our browsing history, spam mails that contain keywords
selected according to the content of all the mails that we send and receive, physical advertisement
material produced according to our shopping preferences. Yet it is rare that this potential
awareness is used for something else, more useful, beside the obvious commercial purposes or
blacklisting the courageous few that dare borrowing flying manuals from libraries in the USA,
raising all sort of privacy-related concerns. This awareness of people’s behaviour could truly shine
and show its full potential if utilized to design experiences. One caveat, though: we are all very
different people, with different backgrounds and histories; thinking that it is possible to mass-
design experiences is not only reductive and naïve, but also potentially harmful. If our products
could somehow tap into that knowledge distributed in the trails and reflect it back to its origin, the
user, then we could really be on the verge of that brave new world.
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