Play-Persona: Modeling Player Behaviour in Computer Games

Due to the fact that each game metric message includes location data in the form of X,Y and Z
coordinates, it is possible to perform an evaluation of the performance of the player at different
scales:
Single sector: within a certain level it is possible to score the performance of a player in different
sub-sections of that level.
Whole level: aggregating the scores for each sub-sector, a player can be scored for his/her
performance across the whole level.
Whole game: aggregating the scores obtained for each level, it is possible to show a compounded
score, an average, of the player’s behaviour in the whole game.
This framework enables researchers to score the players interacting with the game in question in a
manner that aggregates several variables and compare the profiles.
5. Conclusions
Play personas can be built with the same methods used to profile people’s personality, namely the
Five Factor Model, and they can be useful both as an a priori metaphor during pre-production and
as a posteriori lens to evaluate behaviour of players [6, 26].
The initial hypothesis, the persona-as-metaphor has a prescriptive nature: after individuating the
dimensions emerging from the core mechanics it is possible to define personas as guiding beacons
during the design phase. The final analysis, the persona-as-lens is of a descriptive nature: it allows
to observe the clustering and the subdivisions of players’ behaviours. The main uses for these
aggregate constructs are:
- phenomenological debugging (balancing of experiences), some levels are "open" in terms of
defining what kinds of experience can emerge from the player-game interaction, some others are
"closed"
- envisioning possible ways the game can be played; some levels will show the not-so-invisible
hand of the designer forcing the players behaviour in a bottleneck, limiting possibility for expression
and therefore the depth of the experience
- verification of hypotheses set forth during design phase (designers imagined a certain way their
game could be used, play patterns can verify that or not)
- insuring variation and change in gameplay by providing quantifiable proof for variety of play
- optimization of features and resources (making sure that no feature in the game is underused or
wasted).
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