Play-Persona: Modeling Player Behaviour in Computer Games

4.2.3 Player expression
Player expression is a phenomenon that involves the whole domain of experience, both perception
and reflection, and as such is at the same time a conscious and an unconscious process. Play-
personas can help structuring the expression of players in game, but these personas are not always
necessarily the same ones inscribed in the game by designers.
4.3 Peirce’s Trichotomy
This model bears more than a slight resemblance to Peirce’s trichotomic systems [104]. Trichotomy
was envisioned as a way to understand how perceptions coalesce into knowledge and eventually
founding a possible applied science; this science was introduced by Peirce as the "art of making
three-fold divisions”. This technique allows triadic analyses-syntheses based on three principles:
• Firstness is concerned with ideas, freedom, multiplicity, qualities, feeling, image and
possibility. It is closely related to the bodily and sensory apparatus.
• Secondness signifies events, brute actions, reactions, existence, facts and causality. It is
concerned with rational and verbal realities.
• Thirdness brings together firstness in relation to secondness by means of habits, patterns,
thoughts, representations, mediation and meaning.
The examination of transactions between designers and players can benefit from this triadic
approach because it transcends any debate asserting the supremacy of games-as-systems or
games-as-stories. This triadic approach levels the field and shows how both aesthetic and ludic
codes are necessary to allow player experiences arise from the tapestry of the game.
4.3.1 Articles tagging system
All the articles in this thesis have been tagged with a small symbol in the header to show the angle
of the code under investigation.
This symbol identifies articles focused mostly on player experience, patterns of habits
and behaviours, sense-making processes.
This symbol identifies articles focused on ludic codes, actions, game rules and
mechanics.
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