Play-Persona: Modeling Player Behaviour in Computer Games

ook: FLUX, published in 2008. This article is the first formalization of an idea that had been
growing for the previous year during my collaboration with IO Interactive: models of players’
behaviour, play personas, could be expressed procedurally, in numbers, and gathered by
records and logs of play time (game metrics).
5- Defining personas in games using metrics. This paper was presented at Futureplay 2008 (peer
reviewed) and is a much more complete and formal version of the ideas presented in the
previous article. A framework for modeling players’ behaviour based on game metrics is
presented, but the method is only shown without presenting an actual case study based on
concrete examples, in fact the game used as example does not have the capability to gather
metrics data from players.
6- Play-personas: behaviours and belief system in user centered game design. This paper,
presented at INTERACT 2009 (peer reviewed), presents a complete formulation of the play-
persona framework and for the first time is accompanied by a concrete case study where play
personas have been built both “a priory”, starting from the affordances offered by the game,
and “a posteriori” based on the data generated by players using the game “Tomb Raider
Underworld”.
7- Towards gameplay analysis via gameplay metrics. This article was presented at Mindtrek 2009
(peer reviewed) and it stems from corollary analyses of gameplay data. Two case studies are
presented with parallel approaches to analyze level design: location, role at death and cause of
death for the multiplayer game “Fragile Alliance”; and deviation from an ideal, perfect path for
the single player game “Kane & Lynch”.
8- Analyzing spatial user behaviour in computer games using geographic information systems. The
article, presented at Mindtrek 2009 (peer reviewed), attempts a complex multivariate analysis to
investigate the pattern of deaths using geographic information systems based on data gathered
from users playing the game “Tomb Raider Underworld”. The result is that such an analysis can
potentially lead to precious recommendations for level designers.
9- Player modeling using self-organization in Tomb Raider: Underworld. This article, presented at
the IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games 2009 (peer reviewed), attempts
to utilize emergent self-organizing maps (a type of neural network) to identify clusters of
players behaving similarly in the game “Tomb Raider: Underworld”.
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