Bartle’s Player Types

Way back in the olden days of the late 80’s, just as video games started to be born, there were Multi-User Dungeons (or MUDs). These were early RPGs where players from across the world could interact in a virtual world that was completely based off of text.

One of the co-creators of the first MUD was British professor Richard Bartle from the university of Essex. Bartle, as one of the first game researchers ever, had a fascination for how players behaved in these shared worlds and in a seminal paper in 1991 (which you can read in full here), categorized players based on their preferred actions and goals in the game.

He divided the players into 4 types:

• Achievers — These players play to improve and beat themselves. They are motivated by upgrades, achievements, personal high scores and cosmetic items that they can show off.
• Explorers — These players like to immerse themselves in a world and story. They take their time searching every nook & cranny of a place and love to be surprised with easter eggs. They love deep story and lore and can get bored if they’ve seen all the content in a game.
• Socializers — These players are in it for the social aspect of a game, rather than the game itself. They like to play with friends and hang out, and some also enjoy complex, interesting characters. Winning and losing is less important than interacting with others.
• Killers — These players are motivated by confronting and surpassing other players. They like to see themselves come up top in the leaderboards and rankings or to continuously defeat others in multiplayer games.

Games were simpler back then, but human motivations are by and large similar. This taxonomy still applies as a good broad strokes approach to know why players play. For us game designers it is useful to know in two ways:

• When figuring out our target audience (such as when making personas).
• When listing mechanics in a larger game to hit multiple quadrants.

You can read more about the former in the Persona page, but here I’d like to focus on the latter use case. While smaller games don’t need as many players to be profitable (and as such it is recommended that you focus on one player type), large games need a lot of sales/downloads and need to attract a much larger audience. Similar to Hollywood’s Four-Quadrant Movie, they need to have a little bit for everyone. Using Bartle as a template during your GD-2, you can make sure to have mechanics for everyone.

By the way, if you want to see where you fall on the Bartle taxonomy, you can take an online test.

As opposed to other tools in this toolbelt, where the author is lost to time, we know exactly who created this and when. You can find Richard Bartle’s seminal paper online. There is an expanded version with a third dimension of how players go about their engagement (explicit/implicit z-axis). You can read this here, though I have never seen it in a non-academic setting.

During the GD-2, while listing out Secondary Mechanics

1. Draw the grid on a whiteboard.
2. Write down each mechanic on a post-it.
3. While discussing with the team, place each mechanic on the quadrant it targets.
   • There are some mechanics that affect multiple player types, don’t be afraid to break them down into multiple post-its or place them on the axis itself.
4. Notice any clusters or gaps compared to your target audience; make sure they align.

Let’s imagine you are working on an open world survival/base building that needs to hit all quadrants.

You sit with other designers and list the most important mechanics & features:

• Survival Meters — Hunger, cold, illness meters that you need to constantly look out for
• Crafting — basic crafting allows you to pick up material to create new tools & buildings, however, an advanced version let’s you carefully place parts to customize your creations
• Combat — players fight against beasts in the wilderness, and against other players who drop into the world.
• Player drop-in — Sometimes players’ worlds will “overlap” with one another, allowing two players to interact with each other, be it to cooperate or compete.
• Pets — Advanced players can tame beasts.
• Survivor Gang — Players can join with others into ‘gangs’ which lets them share resources and unlocked crafting plans
• Journal entries — The game’s deep, twisted lore is found in hidden journal pages which can be found in the wilderness.
• Video Recording — Our new tools let’s players easily record their gameplay and post it on social media.

With this list, the Bartle grid might look like this

As we can see here, there is a gap for the Killer player type. Despite featuring player combat, there aren’t many spaces for players to express this. So the design team can decide to add new features, for example a PVP arena, leaderboard or in-game events that bring combative players together. Word of warning though, be careful with adding new features as this increases scope; producers are happier when you modify other features to be more inclusive.

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