Play-Persona: Modeling Player Behaviour in Computer Games

Combining both of these two approaches allows designers to sharpen game experiences without
falling into neo-positivist, data-driven fallacies, nor solipsistic decisions taken by designers too
abstracted from players.
The play-persona framework belongs to the same group of research that attempts to find player
types, such as Bartle’s types [13], Yee’s motivations [100] and Bateman’s categories [14]. While
each of these approaches is structured either top-down (deductively) or bottom-up (inductively),
play-personas, with their two-headed nature of metaphors and lenses, succeed in making use of
both approaches.
5.1 Future work
This research took place at a particular moment where EIDOS was investing resources into the
development of a metric suite designed to collect data about player behaviour, therefore it is clearly
noticeable how most of the articles possess a bias towards quantitative analyses and
interpretations. This happened not because of a belief in the superiority of quantitative methods,
but because of the opportunity to use and experiment with a tool that in game development was
still rather new. Future work should focus on how to integrate the methods explored during this
research with qualitative approaches to observing the human side of players: interviews, self
reports, video footage, participant observation, ethnographic and anthropological enquiries, etc.
Another venue worthy of in-depth exploration is investigating how to incorporate biometric data 4
into the definition and use of play-persona profiles.
In this research, Peircian semiotics has been merely scratched, attempting to describe the relation
between aesthetic codes, ludic codes and play experiences; but future work could explore the
possibility to adapt Peirce’s theoretical complexity to account for the emergence of meaning from
game worlds. Furthermore a handful of semioticians following the footsteps of Varela and Maturana
are working on cybersemiotics: “a combination of a Peircian-based biosemiotics with system
science, cybernetics, autopoiesis theory, second order cybernetics and information science” [108].
This angle views the interplay of mind and body as a sign and attempts to understand how the
prerequisites for human consciousness are laid down in the evolution of the human’s bodily system.
This could help reading the acts of communication of the avatar as a digital body.
4
Among all possible biometric variables the most important are: electroencephalograms, heartbeat rate, blood
pressure, skin conductance and eye gaze tracking.
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