Play-Persona: Modeling Player Behaviour in Computer Games

according to their positioning on a stealth-aggression axis and other in-game behaviorally triggered
scores, with status titles ranging from “mass murderer”, “silent assassin”, “mad butcher” to “the
cleaner”. The titles relate closely to the personas implied by the designers.
6. CONCLUSIONS
Figure 5: Navigation fingerprint for the persona: “Silent assassin”
Figure 6: Interaction fingerprint for the persona: “Silent assassin”
A key design challenge in game development is to ensure optimal experience for a variety of player
preferences. In the above, it has been attempted to argue for the use of persona constructs as a
means for categorizing and analyzing character-bound metrics, as a tool for informing the process
of developing and testing a diversity of play behaviors in a computer game. In addition to personas,
play-style and play mode have been defined as two different methods for utilizing metrical data to
define player behavior. Due to space constraints, it has not been possible discuss how best to
analyze character-bound metrical data in practice or present them in reports; this is a topic for
future work. The use of instrumentation data are a highly useful approach towards integrating user
behavior in game design- and development. As a HCI method applied to game development,
metrics form a valuable addition to existing user-testing methods, providing precise data about
player behavior extending outside the data range of e.g. usability methods. Metrics data combined
with on-going persona classification form an interesting perspective with regards to procedurally
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