Play-Persona: Modeling Player Behaviour in Computer Games

neurophysiology. The style is also slightly inconsistent, one article is in fact written in a rather
informal tone since it was not meant for a scholarly venue but for a popular publishing outlet.
Nevertheless these articles have been included because of the unique and pivotal contributions to
the corpus of work. I am also painfully aware of the considerable amount of repetitions from article
to article: for example the concept of gameplay metrics has been defined, at different levels of
detail, in at least six of the articles presented, but this issue is to be expected in a thesis by
publications.
The thirteen writings that comprise the compendium appear in chronological order of composition
and have not been modified from the original form, except for formatting changes and a short
preface. To guide the reader, here is provided an overview of the pieces with a few words
contextualizing the works.
1- Towards a theory of the player: designing for experience. In this first article, presented at
DIGRA 2007 (peer reviewed). I attempted to understand the processes in action when players
are engaged with games. It is clear a preoccupation with the behaviour of the player in the
game world and the relation between personality, experience and emotion.
2- Designing levels for enhanced player experience: cognitive tools for game worlds designers.
This article, of a marked aesthetic nature, grew out of a lecture presented at Nordic Game 2007
and was eventually published in the international magazine GameFace. The main goal of the
article was to apply methods from visual semiotics and disassemble a level from a game,
“Hitman: Blood Money”, that was considered “open” enough to allow its players to express
themselves and, to a certain degree, shape their own experience.
3- Waving experiences: play values, play modes and play personas. This article, accepted at the
conference IE 2007 (peer reviewed), intended to abstract and formalize processes that were
enacted during the production of the game “Kane & Lynch”. These processes showed how
designers embedded values in the rules codified by the game and how these rules were used by
players to shape their experience. The selection of a rather “closed” game such as “Kane &
Lynch” as opposed to “Hitman: Blood Money” was motivated by the fact that if the identified
process managed to allow players non trivial choices it would prove the point also for more
“open” games.
4- Weaving experiences in virtual worlds: play personas and game metrics. Although the title
might recall the previous article, this piece was written specifically for a Danish Design School
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