Play-Persona: Modeling Player Behaviour in Computer Games

emergence of subpersonalities, it is important to stress how their development it is not pathological
but rather a normal state for all human beings.
The idea of subpersonalities is a way of conceptualizing how we shift from one identification to
another as we move through life. In a single day we may move through playing "victim", "critic",
"couch-potato", "striver", "lover", "frightened child" and so on. The kinds of subpersonalities that
can exist within any one person can be infinitely variable and any taxonomy of types or
psychodynamic mappings can be used to label them. Assagioli himself used several of Jung’s
archetypes to label subpersonalities, but it is just one of the several psychodynamic mappings that
can be used to address behavioural aggregates.
A first attempt to integrate Damasio’s somatic markers (or Pert’s peptide network) and
subpersonalities would lead towards a statement of this kind: subpersonalities emerge as
conglomerate entities collecting isotopic and consistent somatic markers. When in the subconscious
there are enough “automatic responses” and when these reflexes are consistent enough, they tend
to coalesce as subpersonalities, each one of them with a predictable set of behavioural, emotional
and rational patterns. Subpersonalities are not a-priori, platonic realities, but Gaussian distributions
of somatic markers (or peptide networks) with some degree of consistency and arranged in
clusters, that we chose to label in certain ways. At this point the definition of personality
individuated in the introduction of this article would not apply to the whole person, but to each and
every individual subpersonality. It is important to stress how each subpersonality contains its own
set of values, belief structures, coping mechanisms, motivations, defining emotional sets (preferred
or default emotional states), hard coded rational processes, ways of thinking, desires and needs to
satisfy.
I have chosen to focus on psychosynthesis' theory of personality because it introduces and
elaborates deeply the concept of subpersonality, which, as we will see later, is a pivotal concept
when planning to design game worlds around a lexicon of player’s personalities, furthermore it
provides excellent mental tools when describing and comparing different psychodynamic mappings.
5 Unified theory of the player
Synthesizing the arguments set forth during the previous paragraphs I can attempt to sketch a
unified draft for a functional model of how the player relates to the game world (see figure 2):
1 - When the player is immersed in the game world one of his/her subpersonalities is triggered and
takes action, emanating a behaviour that is consistent and functional both in relation to the
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