Play-Persona: Modeling Player Behaviour in Computer Games

FIGURE 1 Perceptive and Reflective Experience
1. The player controls the avatar. Avatar is here intended as the medium that transfers agency
from the player to the world and receives feedbacks from the game world on behalf of the player;
as the term’s etymology suggests it is the incarnation, in the virtual world, of a deity belonging to
reality: the player. A lot more space should be devoted in investigating the relation between player
personality and avatar behaviour. The resulting, in-game, behaviour is an emanation of the player’s
personality. This assumption must be taken carefully since one has to take into consideration the
bias operated by the designers who limit the game world. Not all choices are opened to the player
for expressing his/her personality but only a certain subset allowed by the designers. This subset
often predetermines certain behaviours, so the emanated player’s behaviour is a subset, simplified
and biased, of the player’s personality.
2. The avatar interacts with the game world and its underlying mechanics.
3. The avatar receives feedback from the game world (instigating stimulus). I decided to include
avatars as part of this negotiation because as we have seen they clearly represent a filter that can
bias game encounters due both to the connotative nature of the avatar itself (its esthetical qualities
might foster certain behaviours and frustrate others) and eventual functional constraints embedded
by the designer (i.e.: the avatar cannot jump).
4. The player receives feedback both from the avatar and the game world; he/she is aroused by it
(physiological correlates).
Steps between 1 and 4 fall into the domain of perceptive experience (erlebnis): the “lived-through”
event.
5. This arousal, together with personality traits, is interpreted as an emotion (cognitive appraisal).
72