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One of the things I do at one of my jobs is analyze how users experience the game, and if it’s “fun” – this is an incredibly complex topic, which I will attempt to tackle in a series of posts, addressing the various ways games are “fun” to users.
This first post will look at the underlying player perspectives which drive what people view as “fun.”
Fun for Who?
At first blush, “fun” may seem self-evident and obvious to a gamer or a new designer. Stuff is fun or it isn’t! It just IS FUN! That view, however, is not useful when you are dealing with design or analytics – you want quantifiable data and clear design strategies – and it tends towards the myopic. People tend to gravitate towards what they find fun, and that will help define their own view of what fun is. If I can impress one thing upon you, readers, let it be this – there are MANY types of game players who find a HUGE range of things fun. Far too many new designers (or armchair analysts) cater to their own view of what’s fun, instead of realizing the vast range of interests among potential players.
Realizing, recognizing and designing for that range is what makes a truly stellar game.
Now, by range, I do not mean “Shooters vs Facebook Games” or “Sci-fi vs Fantasy.” Interest types come in many flavors, and genre is only one of the ways you can tap into someone’s concept of “fun” – obviously, I am not suggesting that designers change their genre or core concept or theme. Instead, I am stressing the importance of recognizing that people play games for a variety of reasons, in a variety of ways, and find a variety of things enjoyable.
Bartle Types
One of the core ludology studies from the early days of online gaming is the Bartle Test. The concept is basically the gaming world’s version of the Myers-Briggs personality test – basically, each person plays games a different way, with many players falling into specific categories. Many quizzes and tests have sprung up around this concept, letting gamers quickly assess their “type” – results range from a Killer to an Explorer to an Achiever. In recent game development, the MMO Wildstar based their character classes off this concept.
The concept itself is somewhat archaic (it’s from 1996, which is forever in the game industry timeline), and a bit rigid (if I spent a day training people and sitting in meetings at work, I may be far less inclined to be my usual Socializer persona, and might just want to mindlessly play a Killer all night)…but it’s a solid idea to consider when designing games and considering the people who will play them. Audience is, afterall, a huge thing to consider during development.
In my personal opinion, a good game hits more than one player type – and a great game appeals to all of them. A solid designer should, at the very least, acknowledge the different types, and consider if his or her game can include elements which will appeal to that gaming style. In future posts, I will dive into the individual types, for more concrete examples…
a little bit of everything all of the time 
Hey Kaliy! You know, I just happened to check my old blogroll after many years and noticed that yours was still active…but only since September? Funny coincidence…had I happened to check a few months earlier, yours would have seemed abandoned like so many others.
Do you expect to ever continue this series? I’d certainly be interested!
Oh wow, thanks for the comment. I gave up on it as everything became centralized to social media, but I’ve recently been thinking about returning to my own site given how overrun with bots and spam sites like reddit have become. The last few posts I’ve made here are just copy from posts I made on Reddit.
Maybe we’re about to experience another renaissance of blogging. I personally prefer reading longform writing about this stuff. Maybe I should create more of it.
Yeah, I used to do some WoW blogging years ago, but I noticed both other blogs on my blogroll dying and waning views on my own blog and came to the conclusion that I was writing into the void. That’s not necessarily useless, but I just struggled with motivation to put effort into writing if no one was likely to see it.
In re-reading this, I noticed you said part of your job is analyzing the UX of games. I take it you’re a game designer? I’m a UX designer, so I do something similar, just not specific to games!
I do QA, but that’s dipped into UX and player experience in small companies.
I think we’re due for a blog renaissance. Social media has become bots and spam, but people still want longform reads about topics they like. At the risk of sounding like and ad, eg the thing that killed blogging, I’m kinda digging this new app. WordPress always felt a bit clunky but I feel like I can post and interact well here, so I’m thinking about putting my posts here instead of somewhere like reddit where they just siphon value from my own work.
Let’s get back into blogging. All of us! Hell, let’s setup old 90s webrings of recommended content. The internet needs good, thoughtful stuff right now.
Ha. Maybe I’ll try my hand at some blogging again. My profile here links to my (ill-fated, aborted) music blog, but it looks like you actually have my old WoW blog in your blogroll–Holy Word: Delicious.
And looking at my blog, your blog is on my blogroll by an old name–The Casual Everythinger. All of this is very nostalgic.
Now I just have to figure out if I still have things to say!
I think you have stuff to say. I think 1e should start a blogging renaissance.
I do miss the blogging era. I’m fairly sure that if I write some new blog posts, I’ll be yelling into the void at this point (even in the best of times, I didn’t have a large readership), but I’ll give some thought to writing a post!
Link when you write something. I’m sick of what social media and the internet have become, let’s just get back to roots.
I will. Oh, one thing I wondered; I noticed you renamed your blog as it looks like you plan to diversify what used to be a “WoW blog” (as I recall)–do you still play WoW?
Not ATM, but I dip in now and then to play in bursts of activity. Social stuff died off ages ago, lost my guilds, and don’t play regularly anymore.
I do think there’s also this fear we are steeping in – I dealt with Gamergate shit, for example, and you’ll notice a huge pullback in my activity coinciding when that happened. I feel fine chatting now, but what if we explode in popularity – at one point, that was a great goal, but it quickly became dangerous (going viral). I feel like I want to make my blogs private, but then how do I find new readers?
Yeah, I understand the concern with putting yourself out there on social media. I think with the combination of how many people can see it (the larger the population, the more nutcases see it too) and anonymity fueling some people’s worst instincts, ugliness is pretty likely to be involved.
I think that’s true for everyone, but especially for women, for a number of reasons. In the gaming space particularly, it started out as a heavily male-dominated space and while it’s diversifying more and more, the resonance of that originally heavily male-coded space still has toxic repercussions.
Here’s a fun one – I can’t even link a new post on social media. I get automatically deleted from view because my new account is considered sketchy by automated systems. Fuck me for trying to preserve some anonymity lol
Is there a way to DM on this site? I’ll show you the interactive fiction I’ve been making, just don’t want to post it publicly.
Hmm, good question. I’m not sure. Clicking on your or my name just seems to send one to the blog itself, not a profile page.
Nice, thanks, I’ll check it out. If there’s a way to contact you on that site, I’ll say more about it once I’ve had time to try it out.
I checked out the Arcbow Anthology. A neat concept–a lot like the Choose Your Own Adventure books I read/played as a kid, with some nice interactive elements to leverage the computer aspect. I like the art you generated–I actually played around with SDXL myself during the second half of last year. The style of the images you created really nailed comic books and Westerns.
I thought it was a little rough in places but, as you said, it’s a casual project and I think it’s pretty good for that!
Oh, wow, thanks for checking it out! The archery core mechanic is an evolution from a pure text-based one I did in an earlier game called Delve and it’s so bad lol, but I’ve been thinking about ways to improve it, like a *pow* animation on a hit akin to comic book effects, and maybe just simplify it to be just a timing game (like in the operation room scene).
Hey, you see that WoW has a remix of MoP? I’m doing a nostalgia bomb this weekend. Husband loved old WoW but never played MoP.