Play-Persona: Modeling Player Behaviour in Computer Games

on that text. Later, Barthes introduced the concepts of “lisible” (readerly) text in which readers are
restricted to just reading and “scriptible” (writerly) texts, in which the readers are active in the
creative process. This distinction shows great awareness of the fact that some texts, due to their
polysemic nature, are more prone to empower the reader [12].
Derrida talks about open borders or margins of texts [31, 32, 33] while Eco reframes the concepts
as “open” texts and “closed” texts [34], not as discreet categories but as the two poles of a
continuous axis. In order to set a limit to potentially unlimited semiosis and escape excessive
subjectivism, in his later work [39, 37] Eco proposes to keep the intention of the work (intentio
operis) in mind and to limit the endless series of interpretations by the means of a simple principle:
inner textual coherence. If an interpretation cannot be denied by the literal meaning of any part of
the text or the cultural frame from which it was produced, then it is considered to be valid.
The research around play-personas analyzes how the visual elements of games can carry the
intentio ludi (intention of the work when the work is a game), partly closing the field of
interpretation and guiding the implied player towards a set of assumptions that will eventually
result in resonant and reverberating meanings. For example in the game Fallout 3 [40] players take
the role of a character that leaves the relative security of a shelter to venture in a post-apocalyptic
world looking for his/her father. Following the main storyline players eventually wander into the
basement of the Jefferson Memorial in Washington D.C. Here, by listening to some holotapes, they
discover the rooms where the character was born. As soon as the discovery of the tapes is over,
players are presented with a visual cue of an old, red tricycle abandoned on the ground (figure 3).
Some of the players might make the connection: “the character I am representing not only was
born here, but spent some of the first years in this environment and used to play with that toy…
that was MY trickey”.
Figure 3: the red tricycle in the game Fallout 3
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