Play-Persona: Modeling Player Behaviour in Computer Games

fear”). The German terms “erfahrung” and “erlebnis” will be used to refer to the two sides of
experience. The philosopher Walter Benjamin defines erfahrung as “wisdom gained in subsequent
reflection on events or interpretation of them” [3]. It is understanding of life and the world we live
in; it is experience as an ongoing, cumulative and critical-cognitive process; “journeyed-through”
knowledge, mature reflection on events. Erfahrung is elaborated after an encounter with a game; it
selects the memorable moments and builds preconceptions and expectations for the next game
encounter. Erlebnis is “mentally unprocessed, immediately-perceived event” [3] a one-off
encounter, a particular sensation that does not build towards a greater whole; it is isolated,
categorical, without cognition, “lived-through” aesthetic/ecstatic perception. It is immediate, pre-
reflective and personal. Erlebnis is found while a player is engaged with a game, while she hasn’t
had the time to reflect or express judgments. In the following “erfahrung” will be translated into
reflective experience or reflection and “erlebnis” into perceptive experience or perception.
2.1 Experience design and personality
It is unrealistic to design experiences expecting to take into consideration the history, the reflective
experience, of each single player; but the perceptive experiences, the here-and-now experiences,
can easily be accounted for through the use of gameplay metrics. The term refers to numerical
data derived from the interaction of players with game recording the behaviour of the player (i.e.
location, use of skills, powers, abilities, etc.) [26].
Furthermore, several efforts have been made to categorize players’ types in order to precisely tailor
games to their audience. Methodologies and approaches to investigate and catalogue game
experience have been taken from communication and media theory [14, 27], cognitive science [16,
17], neurobiology [25], physiology [7, 18-20, 21, 22], behavior [9], human-computer interaction [4,
5, 11, 12, 24], brain-computer interfacing [8, 23] and other areas. Particularly interesting are the
studies that attempted to compile a taxonomy of player types. Bartle’s study pioneered the concept
of analyzing players’ behaviour in MUDs and resulted in the known four types [1]. Yee worked
further in that direction uncovering three factors that motivate players [28]. Bateman & Boon
deduced four different player types starting from the MBTI [2].
In general it appears that the taxonomies of players have some common features:
- they are inspired by type-based personality theories as opposed to trait-based;
- they claim to be universal and applicable across a wide variety of games.
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