Play-Persona: Modeling Player Behaviour in Computer Games

2. A THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK FOR MODELING PLAYERS
Before unfolding play-personas in detail, it is necessary to chart the environment from which the
tool has emerged. This line of research in fact does not only stem from game studies, but has its
feet firmly planted both in Human-Computer Interaction and in communication studies.
The study of games from an academic perspective is a fairly recent phenomenon. Being computer
games very complex artifacts, perhaps the richest cultural genre yet seen, they lend themselves to
a number of approaches and perspectives. Game studies as a discipline is not only multi-
disciplinary, showcasing a variety of independent fields of research scrutinizing the phenomenon
separately, but also inter-disciplinary since there have been several cases of research projects that
successfully crossed boundaries between established academic fields [43, 55]. Yet, because of this
multifaceted nature, the necessity for an independent discipline focusing on games is still debated
[67]. Independently from the position taken on the subject by different scholars there is one factor
that cannot be ignored whatever angle is used to approach the issue: human players. Games are
both objects and processes and as such they must be played. In Aarseth’s words:
“Playing is integral, not coincidental like the appreciative reader or listener. The creative
involvement is a necessary ingredient in the uses of games. The complex nature of simulations is
such that a result can’t be predicted beforehand; it can vary greatly depending on the player’s luck,
skill and creativity. In multi-player games, social skills are needed, or must be developed.” [2]
2.1 Game studies: contributing disciplines
The role of the human player cannot be ignored if we want to understand how games as processes
can take place. It has been argued [19] that the diversity of perspectives adopted to investigate the
cultural phenomenon of games could be a result of the indispensability of the human player as an
actuator of games as processes. Games are in fact studied by sociologists, psychologists,
anthropologists and economists attempting to assess the effects of playing games on people [92,
20, 21, 59, 60, 45].
Cognitive science looks at computer games as fields to experiment and test theories on human
consciousness since games represent rich, multi-modal, controllable environments for conducting
cognitive experiments [65].
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