Play-Persona: Modeling Player Behaviour in Computer Games

During the initial phases of the formulation the play-persona framework, I was based at the games
development studio IO Interactive, which had recently released the game “Hitman: Blood Money”
[49]. During an interview with the game director, game designer and level designers, it was
revealed that the team had developed a tool to monitor the player’s behaviour: how many shots
had been fired and by which weapon, which weapon was most frequently used, level of accuracy,
the number of police, security, and civilians killed or injured, and if there were any witnesses. All
this information was used at the end of each mission to rate players and award them extra money
if the mission was accomplished as cleanly and quietly as possible without drawing any unnecessary
attention. Eventually the information was also used to present players with newspapers articles
generated procedurally where the mission was summarized and the statistics of player behaviour
were presented in narrative form.
This tool was, in embryonic form, an earlier prototype of what was later to become the full blown
metric suite developed by the EIDOS Online Development Team, located at IO Interactive. The
metrics suite would be later included in several games developed by EIDOS, such as Tomb Raider:
Underworld [93], Battlestations: Pacific [15] and Championship Manager 2008 [22] among others.
A metrics suite is an instrumentation system designed to provide game studios with metrics data
regarding for example player behaviour. The EIDOS metrics suite has several features in common
with instrumentation techniques used in Human-Computer Interaction: users interact with a system
that automatically records events of interest in message streams, which are send to a central server
for analysis. The EIDOS metrics suite can collect data from game engine software during production
as well as following the launch of a product, from installed clients during the live period of the
lifetime of a game.
A metric suite seemed the best way to support the play-persona as lens used to describe behaviour
of real players, a procedural description of patterns of play. That realization meant that the
humanistic angle of my research could greatly benefit from the inclusion of strictly empirical, data-
driven approaches, but at the same time they would not suppress the need for qualitative methods,
as they together form a complementary, syncretic dyad extremely valuable when studying players.
Individuating the axes upon which to build play-personas is in fact a process that entails extensive
interviews with game and level designers alike.
The two methods are complimentary. Quantitative analysis is not particularly helpful when looking
at experiential phenomena or complex social interactions if approached in any detail. We are miles
away from understanding the human mind, let alone devise methods for analyzing its interaction
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