Players of shared worlds divide into those who pursue achievement, exploration, socialising and dominance, in a mix a design can shift.
Bartle's 1996 paper analysed players of multi-user dungeons and argued the four types exist in a balance the design maintains, so that encouraging one suppresses another. The typology is still used in design and monetisation, and it was never intended as a personality theory.
In practice
- A world that rewards dominance loses its socialisers, and the population that remains looks like a design choice.
- A team survey that sorts staff into four types has produced four labels, not four kinds of person.
- Possible explanations
- The explanation is that a shared world offers four kinds of satisfaction, acting on the world, exploring it, acting on players and interacting with them, and that players sort themselves by which they pursue.
- In its favour
- The scheme is genuinely useful in design, and the claim that the types hold each other in balance, so that encouraging one suppresses another, is specific enough to be checked against a live game.
- Against it
- It comes from observing one genre of text-based world rather than from psychometric work, and later attempts to validate the four types have not supported them as distinct categories.
- Standing
- Derived from observation of one genre of text-based world rather than from psychometric work, and later attempts to validate the four types as distinct factors have had limited success.
- Subject
- Play & Game Design
- Essay
- Small worlds with visible rules