Play-Persona: Modeling Player Behaviour in Computer Games

5. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK
This work started out as a project addressing the very general issue of how to shape attractive
gameplay experiences. Initially, gameplay experience had been identified as arising from the
negotiations that take place between players and designers and this understanding defined two
sides of the issue:
- how do designers envision hypothetical players while producing a game
- how do players make sense of their experience while interacting with a game.
Play-personas have been introduced as probes that allow designers to forecast models of
actualization of the game and at the same time tools that can shape players’ experiences. They are
macro metaphors and conglomerates of play styles.
A persona-centric design provides firstly ludic affordances that are at the same time varied and
consistent; and secondly aesthetic choices that are pertinent and support the play styles emerging
from those affordances.
Several game development studios are already using constructs similar to the metaphoric play-
persona to organize design issues. For example at Ubisoft Montreal, while developing Far Cry 2
[107], designers referred to “Sun Tzu”, “Rambo” and “Fugitive” to address three different attitudes
to deal with hostiles; level designers distributed cover elements in the game world accordingly.
“Sun Tzu”, preferring a more strategic approach, favors being in areas with plenty of opportunities
for cover while the enemies are in open areas. “Rambo” is partial to close combat so he will find
himself in the same area of the hostiles, independently if it is densely covered or not. “Fugitive”
would rather have freedom of movement while the enemies are encumbered navigating a cluttered
space. It does not matter if players wanted to play the “Rambo” persona, the moment they pick up
a knife and start walking close up to the enemy, the performance and the behaviour inscribed in
the artifact “hunting knife” will shape the way they experience the game space.
In spite of that, Far Cry 2 designers making use of personas seem not to have harnessed the power
of gameplay metrics to evaluate whether their hypotheses were confirmed by actual use or not.
Other developers [79] have been utilizing numerical description of player behaviour (lenses) to find
clusters of uses, but were not interested in letting concrete hypotheses of player behaviours
(metaphors) guide the design of the game.
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