Play-Persona: Modeling Player Behaviour in Computer Games

are sets of rational, bodily, and behavioural responses to the perception (or memory) of an
experience. The somatic-marker hypothesis proposes a mechanism by which definite areas in the
brain (ventromedial cortices) establish links between a complex situation and the emotions that
accompany said situation, resulting in the fact that emotional processes (or emotional memories)
can guide (or bias) behaviour, particularly decision-making, by setting bi-univocal indexes from an
experience to an emotion to a behaviour. The physical component of an emotion (its biological
correlates) provides shortcut to effective decision-making.
”Bodily feelings normally accompany our representations of the anticipated outcomes of options”
[12]. In other words, emotions map certain automatic responses to real or simulated decisions.
“Somatic markers serve as automatic devices to speed up the process of selecting biologically
advantageous options” [33]. Somatic markers allow individuals to wade through immense amount
of perceptual/mnemonic data and eventually take action. Although Damasio agrees with Pert on
the fact that emotions emerge from the biochemical chatter between mind and body, he challenges
the “Mobile Brain” theory by asserting that emotions are not the neuropeptides themselves, but
rather the circuit and the patterns that these chemicals activate in the brain. It is important to
notice that, even though the somatic markers were set with input from the body, they can be
recalled through an exclusively neural process.
In this preliminary paragraph I was interested in grounding emotions and memory as fundamental
elements to define memorable playing experience. Candace Pert’s work has pointed out how our
past shapes the way we experience emotions and how different people experience the same event
differently, while Antonio Damasio’s somatic markers theory implies that emotions shape
behaviours and therefore personality. The next step for me is looking into behaviours and
personality both as emanation of emotional states and as results of emotionally charged
experiences.
4 Player’s personality
Most of the studies and analysis of player behaviours in the past few years have been conducted
from a inductive, bottom-up perspective, starting with user tests, player behaviour monitoring, eye-
tracking and logging all player’s actions. The rough data has then been catalogued, analyzed and
eventually synthesized to achieve player’s categories. Richard Bartle synthesized his static types
starting from hundreds of bulletin-board postings from a pool of 15 expert MUD users [4], while
Nick Yee revised Bartle’s types [34] using exclusively empirical data. Essentially all empirical
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