Play-Persona: Modeling Player Behaviour in Computer Games

Analysis seeks to break down complex situations, identify components and ingredients in order to
understand something [30]. Analysis seeks to solve problems through identifying and removing the
cause. Analysis rarely fosters progress towards a desired goal, it barely removes impediments.
Analysis is all about 'what is', the past and present state of things, and its emphasis is on knowing.
Design involves putting things together in order to deliver some value by constructing and creating
solutions [30]. Design is never completely free, it is always bound by constraints and specifications,
nevertheless it is trough design that we move forwards towards our desired goals. Design is all
about 'what can be', future possibilities and its emphasis is on thinking.
The Danish Design School perfectly embodies this dual soul. A few years ago, the school’s
leadership devised a four steps research strategy ranging from basic research, applied research,
practice-based research and artistic practice, covering the entire spectrum from most abstract
research to concrete artistic praxis. Recently, the four layers have been condensed in one
integrated container: practice-based research. One way to concretely implement practice-based
research is “design” informed but not bound by “analysis”. This almost self evident statement was
to become the founding pillar of my research and eventually allow me to fit, albeit slightly
awkwardly, in radically different environments and communicate effectively with people from
opposite ends of the human spectrum. In short, the difficult marriage between analysis and design,
promoted ceaselessly by the research leaders in the Danish Design School, guided my curiosity to
find areas of overlap between knowledge and thought, between truth and purpose. It was only
natural then that my main research question (“How can attractive gameplay experiences be
shaped?”), led me to the topic of gameplay metrics 2 , since they are objective and actionable
records of players’ actions in games. Gameplay metrics can in fact provide both empirical grounds
for decision-making in the form of prescriptive recommendations and also, by offering a snapshot
of the state of the interaction between players and the game, represent a perfect basis to build
descriptive statements. It is in the theorizing and sense-making of the metric data, in the
interpretative layers used to make sense of the data, that analysis becomes design. Every time we
question the data with a hypothesis, every time we approach a problem with expectations towards
a desired outcome we re-create reality, moving closer to our desired goals. The play-persona
2 The term “gameplay metrics” refers to data about players’ behaviour in a game (location, use of skills,
powers, abilities, interaction with other players, deaths, etc.), automatically recorded during a play session.
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