Play-Persona: Modeling Player Behaviour in Computer Games

Considering games as acts of communication entails treating level design issues as a kind of
language. The purpose of a linguistic and semiotic approach is both reading the behaviour of
players performing in game worlds and evaluating the practice of designers creating game worlds.
The ultimate goal is to eviscerate the rules and habits that make this transaction of communication
between designers and players possible.
For both the creative, designer-oriented, side and the performative, player-oriented, side the role of
the player becomes central, either as an idealized model of expected behaviour or as a real subject
of action. And it is from the pivotal role of the player that my research both started (Article 1:
“Towards a Theory of the Player”) and ended (Article 13: “Play-Personas in User-Centred Game
Development”). It is in fact in the construct of the play-persona that I found that unifying governing
principle mentioned earlier.
1.1.1 Game Levels as languages
Language is defined as a vocabulary of elements (dictionary) and a set of rules (syntax) used to
combine them into meaningful propositions [62]. Vocabulary and grammar are identified as
essential components of language. Entire disciplines, such as architecture, can be seen, and have
already been studied, as linguistic processes, where the creator / artist selects elements according
to their function and combines them in spaces [5].
Other constituent elements of languages are the ability to perform syntagmatic and paradigmatic
operations, the power of each element of the dictionary to have denotative and connotative levels
of signification and the use of rhetorical devices.
Dictionary, syntax, connotation, denotation, syntagmatic and paradigmatic operations are essential
features of language, but as Hjelmslev points out [50] they are not sufficient: for a semiotic system
to be properly considered language it must possess creative economy or in other words it is
necessary for it to achieve second articulation: the ability to form an infinite number of meaningful
combinations using a small number of simple units. In this regard games and game levels cannot
be treated as a proper language; there is no finite set of minimal functional non-signifying units
such as phonemes or graphemes, almost every single element in a game world is a sign in itself, a
complete message, possessing therefore only first articulation. Similarly to what happens in films,
the signifier is constrained, motivated, by the signified by the means of iconicity [69].
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