Play-Persona: Modeling Player Behaviour in Computer Games

construct, central element of this thesis, represents exactly that: the bridge between the analysis of
existing data and the design of a desired state.
1.1 Research questions
Level designers are constantly required to simultaneously juggle artistic, technological and design
issues and, after several iterations, ultimately produce a meaningful, consistent and engaging level.
In a situation with dozens of variables in the air (story, art, gameplay, technology, marketing, etc.)
pulling in different directions, it seems necessary to find a unifying construct. In order to insure a
coherent, isotopic, compelling and internally consistent design it is required to find a unifying,
governing principle to be kept in mind both when planning, designing and producing a level and
when evaluating its success rate. In the course of this thesis I will try to individuate such a principle
and construct around it a framework that is flexible enough to fit most types of single player action
games, at the same time it is important that the creators don’t feel that they have to modify
radically their workflows to accommodate for it.
Considering the fuzziness of the concept “attractive gameplay” included in the original mandate of
this research, I chose to focus on the centrality of the role of the player. It is the player’s role that
defines the difference between digital games and other cultural products; hence this research is set
on two complementary sides:
• Do designers think about players when they make games? In which terms? How can
designers build better models of players while designing games, even before any player is
actually engaged with the game?
• How do players think of their play performance and behaviour? How do players organize
and make sense of their own play experiences? How can actual player behaviour be used to
evaluate the models envisioned by designers?
Initially, because of my background in Sciences of Communications (I obtained an MA from the
University of Turin), instinctively I thought of dealing with the practice of level design as a kind of
language and each game level as double-faced act of communication: the practice of designing
levels can be seen as a communication act initiated by the designer with the player as a receiver; at
the same time the performance of a player experiencing a level of a single player game also is an
act of autotelic communication, communication with no receiver or where the receiver is the
sender, where players use the game world to express themselves through behaviours, by the ludic
mise-en-scene.
13