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Which one are you?
There are many reasons people play games. Dr. Richard Bartle proposed four basic
categories of game players
- Achievers - Players who seek to maximize their score or items or status in the game.
- Explorers - Players who want to experience and understand the game world and its design.
- Socializers - Players who use the game as a mechanism to form and expand their social circle.
- Competitors - Players who want to compete with and excel over other players. Dr. Bartle seems to take a more negative view of this category than I do in that he includes abuse of other players as an implicit part of this category. To his four categories, I would add a set of mirror categories. The dark side of gaming:
- Earners - Players who seek to earn the most wealth in the game for real-world reasons. These are the gold farmers and power-levelers.
- Exploiters - Players who carefully study, explore, and analyze the game world and its mechanics to identify weaknesses that give them a substantial advantage, usually due to flaws in the game design and implementation.
- Harassers - Players who use the social mechanisms of the game to make the experience as miserable for others as possible.
- Dominators - Players who use the game's mechanics to make other players miserable. These players are not really interested in doing better than other players, but in making other players know that they have been beaten.
- Exploiters and Earners are often closely tied to game commerce. Exploiters help optimize the earning potential of the game. Harassers and Dominators cover two of the main categories of griefing.
As a game-design note, the existence of the four Bartle categories of players is probably one of the reasons that game commerce exists. Game developers are often Achievers and Explorers. They want players to work through the game and experience all of the developers' carefully crafted content. The problem is that many players are not similarly motivated. Socializers want to be able to play with whom they want when they want. Some Achievers are more interested in status than achievement and they may not have as much time to play as the developers want them to devote to the game. Competitors are interested in competition, not resource gathering or exploration. Explorers may want to be able to go everywhere and do everything without “achieving” everything necessary to unlock all of the game's doors. Game commerce is the shortcut for all of these players to achieve their goals in spite of the game designers' wishes.
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