Play-Persona: Modeling Player Behaviour in Computer Games

according to their mental state. Whether a player walks slowly in the shadows and close to the
walls, or probing the game’s boundaries, or climbing for the highest point to achieve better
overview, or openly running into confrontations or eschewing the clash preferring to take the
flanks: whenever the game affords a multitude of choices, it is important for designers to monitor
what it entails for a player to embody a certain navigation pattern and provide pertinent aesthetic
cues if they want to increase the chances of generating resonant effects.
Due to the intrinsic nature of interactive entertainment, designers deliberately leave room for
textual openness [24]. It is in the gap of this openness that the competence of model players (or
play-personas), actualizing more or less explicit narrative structures [34], reveals the iconic nature
of game aesthetics, providing anchors to affective, narrative and spatial elements. And it is still in
this balance between textual openness and closeness that players can find resonance and
reverberation within the elements of the game world: a completely open text would give birth to
unlimited semiosis, a text too close would not permit personal interpretation and the emergence of
play-personas, trivializing any effort towards polysemic sense-making.
2.3.1 Games as text: early methods for implying readers (and players)
The post-structuralist paradigm that celebrated the death of the author and the birth of the reader
as the source of a plurality of meanings and interpretations also pioneered reader-response theory.
Reader-response theory recognizes the active role of the reader in transforming the unread text
into an actualized work, passing from a type to a token, imbuing the text with “real existence”. It is
the reader that completes the text’s meaning through interpretation in a process similar to an actor
interpreting a written script. Considerable effort was put by many reader-response theorists to
define the different types of archetypical readers.
Eco, after defining literary texts as fields of meaning rather than strings [34], introduces the "model
reader" as "one who plays your game" and accepts the challenge of interpreting complex ideas
[38]. Eco comes to these positions through study of language and from semiotics, rather than from
psychology or historical analysis as did theorists such as Iser.
Iser [54] lists a number of fictional reader types: the real reader, the ideal reader, the superreader,
the informed reader, the intended reader and the implied reader.
The real reader has read and the book and has thoughts about it. The real reader brings to the
meeting with the text a certain baggage in terms of personal history, education, gender etc. that
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