Play-Persona: Modeling Player Behaviour in Computer Games

ABSTRACT
This thesis proposes a framework to sharpen the focus on player experience when designing and
evaluating levels for single player action games.
From a developer’s point of view, game levels are the confluence of art, code and gameplay. From
a player’s point of view, levels are a succession of spaces that contain events.
Due to its intrinsic multidisciplinary nature, level design has been historically difficult to define both
in terms of scope of the discipline (what is the result of the process) and the skill set required from
the level designers. In different game studios it is possible to see how the role of level designer can
be covered by artists with a good understanding of space, architects unbound from gravity and
materials and even the specific subcategory of programmers called scripters 1 . The core focus of
designing game spaces is also often disputed exactly because of the heterogeneous composition of
its ranks. Some teams see gameplay as king, and every other decision is secondary; in other
contexts it is the story that rules and at times even the code, under the appearance of outstanding
technical achievements, can become the compass that orients the design process. Another problem
often encountered in level design is the lack of an irrefutable, quantifiable assessment of quality
and success ratio. QA departments in leading developer’s studios around the world are starting to
devote enormous resources to track players’ metric data and provide unquestionable answers to
issues such as “is this level good enough?” In this setting, the main concern seems to deal with
which parameters are necessary to monitor in order to insure a proper feedback on questions
regarding the success rate of game levels and how to relate the analysis carried out on the raw
data.
This project intends to look for an element that can be the pivot, flexible and solid at the same
time, around which all the other fields and disciplines will harmonically dance, structuring the game
space and providing it with consistency, focus and variety. The result is not a cumbersome
normative procedure, nor a merely descriptive framework, but instead it provides mental and
practical tools for level designers. That central pivot is the play-persona concept, initially inspired
from the field of Human Computer Interaction as a mean to imply players during the design phase
of games.
1
A scripter’s role is to define behaviour of non-playing characters, enemies and events by scripting them in a high
level language such as LUA, Python, etc.
9