Game preferences and the Bartle Test

Ben and I were talking one evening and the topic shifted to FEZ (the indie game phenomenon featured alongside Braid and Super Meat Boy in Indie Game: The Movie) and its merits. Whereas I saw a variety of worlds and puzzles to be discovered and explored, Ben saw a slow, repetitive, and rather engagement lacking experience that bogged him down. As I thought about the reasons behind his dislike for FEZ, I wondered about the mechanisms behind how we choose if a gaming experience is engaging and thoughtful and how we mold these experiences for ourselves given the chance. In other words, what motivates us to continue playing a game?

I thought this kind of question reflects personality psychology's trait theories, a series of models that aims to pin down certain stable conditions that describe someone as a whole. Here's a model based on two spectrums, emotional stability and introversion/extroversion:  

click to enlarge images

These can get a lot more complicated. Psychologist Lewis Goldberg proposed a five-dimensional model; Raymond Cattell came up with one using sixteen different factors. Looking at the above diagram, we can definitely attribute these personalities to gaming personalities: extraverted players may have a higher affinity towards social games whereas introverts prefer single-player experiences; more emotional players might prefer an engaging story whereas more emotionally calm people may be happy with a simple casual puzzle game. 

Writer, professor, and game researcher Richard Bartle described player preferences in a similar fashion to trait theory in his paper "Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit MUDs." This paper was written in 1996 and pertains mostly to MUDs (multi-user dungeons) and MMORPG's, but I feel like we could try and apply this to other game genres. Take a look at the foundation for Bartle's ideas:

which are you?

Bartle's characterized players into four groups named after the four suits in a deck of cards, labeled for their respective traits: hearts (socializers), clubs (killers), diamonds (achievers), and explorers (spades). Each describes a drive or motivation a player seeks in a gaming experience: hearts love the social aspect of games and helping others; clubs can't wait to show their 1v1-me-bro skills and their abilities to read an opponent; diamonds glitter in the best gear, bathe in achievements, and adorn the top-score or top-time listings; spades dig around for secrets and hidden passages, leaving no stone unturned. It is this amalgam of the four that I feel succinctly and fairly describes a gamer. 

All of these areas have overlaps with the other groups in some way or another. For example, diamonds may seek the top of the leaderboard in a game like StarCraft where 1v1 reigns supreme and is home to clubs. The spade may also belong to a guild where he or she shares information about the latest patch and where all the good loot can be found in a newly released area. We are a composite of all four suits with emphasis on different areas depending on what kind of game we're playing. 

Let's apply Bartle's model to two games outside of MUDs and MMORPGs and see what happens.

Team Fortress 2- If my friends and I were to make a top ten or top five favorite games of all time, I'm willing to bet Team Fortress 2 is going to be on there. The hearts love to play with friends in this multiplayer setting; clubs want to show that they are the best on the server; diamonds are trading away for the latest in hat fashion; spades are looking for the latest hints and clues towards the next update (or they're looking for map exploits).

SpaceChem- Probably my most favorite game. Hearts might be busy on the forums discussing the latest technique and helping people with some of the puzzles; clubs are lined up at the tournaments ready to show their SpaceChem wits; diamonds want the highest efficiency rating possible; spades are delving into the newly released player-made puzzles working out new techniques and tricks.

Team Fortress 2 and SpaceChem are completely different games and rightfully have different areas of emphasis to different people. For me, Team Fortress 2 emphasizes the heart and club- I want to get better at the game but I find it boring without playing with friends. SpaceChem invokes my inner spade as I search around for new ways to complete the puzzles. 

another handy chart

FEZ called upon the spade in me like in SpaceChem; the curiosities and fine details leave me wanting to look for more secrets and areas within the game. As for Ben, he mentioned FEZ's platforming lacking urgency or skill, so maybe his diamond facet was dissatisfied. Whatever the case, this all illustrates that our alignment in the spectrum isn't tied down to one or two suits: our alignment and preferences changes from game to game, genre to genre. 

The next time a game pops up in your mind, think about what lead you to like or dislike the game and try applying Bartle's model- you might come to some interesting incites. But how does a game manage to alter your alignment across genres? Why don't hearts stay hearts and clubs stay clubs across all games and genres?- after all, one of the defining assumptions in trait theory is that traits are relatively stable. And if they don't change for you, why is that? These are some interesting questions we can look into later on.

What we can learn from Gender Bender DNA Twister Extreme

please let me explain

About a week back, Ben sent me a message over Steam with a link to a game on Steam Greenlight called Gender Bender DNA Twister Extreme, disgusted and confused. Then, I looked at the top banner which boasted: "This game has been Greenlit by the Community! The community has shown their interest in this game. Valve has reached out to this developer to start moving things toward release on Steam." My first impressions were Why and How. It was obvious that we had to play the demo at our about-yearly reunion at Mark's. We've watched universally panned movies and played questionable games; let's add to the list, why not.

Gender Bender DNA Twister Extreme is about men who get turned into women and the wacky adventures that ensue, presented in the form of a graphic novel. The demo available on Desura speaks for the game. I didn't like the game, Ben didn't like the game, Mark didn't like the game; let's just leave it at that. If the game had a message to convey, the developers failed monumentally at delivery. But I don't want to discuss the the merits/demerits of the game, rather what we can learn from a game like this from a consumer vista.

This game raised $27,000 from a goal of $5,000 on IndieGoGo and is now asking consumers for $24.99 on Desura for the full game. I've already commented on the content of the game, but here's a different perspective: the developers have shown with full transparency what the game is and how the end product will look. It is completely up to the buyer's decision ("is the game worth $24.99?") and there are people out there who say "Yes, it's worth it." Those people then fork over $24.99 and then ogle at women with crude anatomical deformities- and they're happy for doing so. Or they should be, otherwise I have no idea why anyone would hand over the money for something like Gender Bender. The point is, the developers have fairly shown what the game is without concealing any of its apparent flaws. From there, it's all fair game for the consumer; it's a practice that should be praised.

Now, is it business ethical to ask for $24.99 for a game of Gender Bender DNA Twister Extreme's quality? I feel that if you're going to be buying a game like Gender Bender, $24.99 is a complete scam when content of equal or greater integrity is floating out around the internet for free (what I'm really trying to say is that porn is free on the internet). Chances are, if you've found Gender Bender, you can find better (or worse) for free. With that, it's your own fault for buying the game.

Scrolling through Gender Bender's Greenlight page, you'll find a majority of people commenting that the game is offensive and/or should have never been brought to Greenlight or even created. Controversial and offensive games are not something new; they've been around since the early days of video games. Just about any game you can think of probably has some speck of controversy brought forth by someone nit-picking the game. While Gender Bender isn't the Citizen Kane of video games, it certainly isn't the Ethnic Cleansing (a game where you kill ethnic minorities) of video games either. The game certainly isn't a step forwards in the depiction of women and transgendered people in video games, but I don't think it's necessarily a step backwards either.

If you don't like the game, don't buy the game. It's a simplified demonstration of the power of consumer efficacy within the video entertainment industry. The games that we buy say something about us and also sends messages to the developers within the industry. Gender Bender DNA Twister Extreme is easily passed off as just some offensive game that boils women down into objects, but the way we handle and respond to games like these also say something about us as consumers. We have all the right and ability to voice our satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the game just as much as the developers have the right to make the game in the first place. Our vote with our Steam wallets will send them a clear message.

Next-gen gaming

"The future begins," Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) 2014 tells us. Or as Kevin Spacey would tell us from the new Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare he's starring in, "The spacefuture begins."

spacey playing the next-gen sim city

It's been about eight months since Microsoft and Sony released their Xbox One and PS4 consoles and both have made quite a lot of money for their respective companies. Console gaming is a huge part of the video entertainment industry and the big bosses have been rallying behind the next-gen banner. 

Writer for the tech blog The Verge, Sean Hollister identified some defining characteristics of next-gen games showcased at E3 2013. Sean noted better graphical fidelity; physics on a larger scale than ever before; open world mechanics; melding of single player and multiplayer experiences; and cross-platform mechanics to be key identifiers of games currently spearheading the next-gen switch. In short, the games are more photorealistic with the cross-platform stuff being slowly picked up and worked on. Even shorter, games look prettier. Save for cross-platform mechanics, the 2007 game Crysis pretty much had a head start- a six year head start.

I don't mean to undermine the graphical advancements made in console development, but at this point in time it is something that is expected out of games, not something to impress anyone with (especially for the big budget AAA titles). Even then, some games (Call of Duty: Ghosts, I'm looking at you) don't even deliver on the graphical fidelity portion of the next-gen deal, leaving behind awkward animations and out-of-place, low resolution textures in its wake.

 e3 is actually just a contest for realistic water and whale physics

Graphical capabilities aside, the cross-platform approach has me the most excited. Battlefield 4 gave us a look at what can be done with cross-platform integration with it's Commander Mode in something akin to the Natural Selection series: while your friends are on the ground, you as the commander can recon, give orders, launch tactical strikes, drop assets, etc. all from the comfort of your iPad or Android phone. This kind of integration opens up a whole new realm of possibilities. In future games, maybe one title can target multiple platforms, each with their own genre. Do you like shooters? Pick up your console controls and blast away! Do you like RTS instead? Pick up your iPad and give orders! Maybe you like puzzle games? Pick up your smartphone, play some puzzle mini-games to give boosts to your team! The idea is out there; it's up to the game developers to craft an effective execution.

it pilots real drones in real life

The gaming industry is in a pivotal transition period. Right now, next-gen isn't all it can be. I believe that the strive for photorealism tunnel-visions developers and leads them to leave out core areas in games (Titanfall really left me disheartened when I learned key multiplayer aspects in a multiplayer only game were left out). Lifelike explosions and fantasy settings bring games to life like never before, but graphics cannot be the only thing that holds up the next-gen banner. 

spacefuture! also no private lobbies in a multiplayer game? no single player? for full price?

I'm looking forward to 2014 and 2015 and all the gaming innovations that will come with it (I'm looking at you, Oculus Rift). The spacefuture is here; we're living in it. We need to be wary of the next-gen banner. We need to make sure that we get the most out of the games we buy and nothing less. As consumers, it's time to redefine what next-gen means before it slips too far out of our control.

TF2- RE: "Get your priorities sorted please."

Browsing the Steam Team Fortress 2 forums, I came across this post: 

"tl;dr version: TF2 is Valve's cash cow but they treat it like a decommissioned farm animal that is ready for the transformation from cow to beef, which is a thing that needs to change."

The post refers to the recent Spring Cleaning update Dota 2 received (fixed many major and minor bugs, balanced and tweaked some skills, and added some new interface changes) and laments about how TF2 has been relatively neglected. 

Team Fortress 2 is a mess right now, no doubt about it. There are some serious bugs in the game: invisible players, people showing wrong team colors, clipping issues, floating cosmetics, medigun beams flying everywhere, particles being stuck, wrong sounds playing, etc.

The game did make a lot of money last year in micro transaction sales, but I would wager that most of the income came from keys and MvM tickets and vouchers. Much of the focus in TF2 has been concentrated in MvM for awhile now with the scarce content updates being added in. Team Fortress 2 has aged really well, but that doesn't mean the game isn't aging. It's been 7 years now, and the game has changed dramatically. 

It's not that the developers don't care about the game, it's just that the game is old. Nobody wants to stick around on a project that can't exactly innovate new technologies or techniques in video game design. For the most part, TF2 is Valve's playground for testing out new community features and then applying features which work to games like Counter Strike: Global Offensive or Dota 2. 

It's fun, it's exciting, but TF2, for better or worse, is slowly being nudged out of the limelight- it's actually been that way for at least a year now. With the coming End of the Line update and the moonbase update, TF2 is still holding on. The communities that exist are still dedicated and active and the competitive scene is relatively healthy. And remember, there's always one thing you can do: keep playing.

Chess- Losing is fun

I got into chess around last October with my friend Blake- he was the one who encouraged me to play. I knew how to play (save for the then weird en passant rule), but it had been so long since I played my last game. I was a little scared to, wavering and saying things like "Oh, but I'm not good" and "I'm going to get destroyed" but he convinced me anyway. If anything, I could watch other matches and nod my head at things I didn't understand.

And I did get destroyed the first couple of times around. 

But rather than reveling in shame or being embarrassed, I realized that I had learned a lot more in that one match. This is why you don't play that move, this is why that opening doesn't work, here are the things you should try for- and on and on. The amount of things to learn was intoxicating.

Looking back now, and seeing all the things I've learned, it's amazing. Sure, I don't know most of the openers and still struggle with most, but I've come to sink a lot of time into just playing chess. Just playing. Blake and I would just meet up and play chess, for hours at a time, figuring out what worked and what didn't.

And it was fun. Really, it was.

From learning overarching tips to finding chess tactics, Blake and I just had a great time. And of course it wasn't all just chess; it's sort of our excuse to just mull around and chew fat. We'd just spend time together figuring out positions, what kind of responses existed, and how insane grand master chess players like Tal were.

I used to be scared of losing. I'm gonna look stupid; look at all these people who know what they're doing. Really though, the most fun in chess comes from fumbling around the board and losing. It's the best way to learn things: losing. You don't have anyone to blame but you, and that's a sign that you can always do better.

I wanted to write about this because of my friends who are just afraid of playing competitive games in general. I don't know how to play. I'll never be good at it. Even if I read up on the material, I'll play badly and I know it.

You have to put your pride past you- it doesn't matter if you lose. Take every loss as a chance for personal growth. The second you make it a mandate to win, the fun aspect of it leaves. Even if you do manage to read up on the topic and study it, you'll never get better if you don't play. Everything is about your attitude and willingness to learn. You have to be able to get past your initial doubts and fears.

And in the end, if you decide you don't like the game, that's that. You gave it an honest try and didn't like it- that's fine. But don't count yourself or the game out before you do give that honest try.

So get out there and play. It won't hurt you, I promise.

Thoughts on Minecraft and servers

So Mark, Ben, and I decided to play Minecraft again. Mark started up a remote server and off we went to explore and build our cities. It had been maybe half a year since we played Minecraft and I wondered why the game wasn't appealing to me to the point where I wanted to actually play single player and actually "beat" the game like I would in Terraria.

It's really fun to build things in Minecraft, but it feels wasteful to just let it sit there without anyone else seeing it. Multiplayer it was. 

It's hard to find a good server.

on our old server i decided to recreate the 'bastion' from a game of the same title

The first thing the three of us did before starting our own server was finding a decent sized server (~10 - 20 regulars) so that building towns and interactions between towns would be feasible. We found a bunch of medieval themed RPG servers which suited our different criteria. Our top-picks soured almost instantly.

First off, the application process for servers: I guess a basic literacy/comprehension test is a good thing to have, especially with Minecraft's community, but some of them are ridiculously tedious. Make up a name to role-play as, what's your job status in-game, what's your lore, make up a country from which your character came from and explain its lore, etc. etc.

We would find entire essays people wrote just so they could get a glance at the server.

Another thing we found consistently was server admins coming up with a "no meta game allowed" rule. I had no idea Minecraft had a meta game, let alone how would one figure out if someone was meta gaming in Minecraft. 

According to one server we looked at, an example of "meta gaming" would be: 

"For instance a massive bandit raid is being planned for your town (OOC [Out-of-Character]) and you dislike that idea to prevent the raid you and your friends build a massive wall (IC [In-Character]) to balk this. Simply you take something you learn either on the forums, or the wiki (Cultures of races can be a good example, along with languages) and use it to give your character an advantage, or strength to a situation."

So in short, a lot of the servers we looked at looked down upon being knowledgeable, even if it is for the sake of role-playing. And because we're all illiterate we didn't want to write an essay either. 

Creative servers didn't exactly do because we still wanted a theme to build around so that our structures would look nice and have rhyme and reason to them without being giant square boxes, so that made pretty much crossed off every other server from the list.

and i think it turned out pretty well

Long story short, we didn't find a good server that just let us go online to gather resources and build things that looked nice and fitting.

Then we just thought, "Hey, let's just make our own server and build stuff." 

And then we did. And then we had a lot of fun. 

I still wish we could share our creations with other people in-game, but then I realized that I stopped caring about all that. I still do wish I had taken screenshots of some of our other buildings and structures. They were pretty neat.

texture pack is jolicraft

And I guess the problem extends beyond Minecraft to any game. Take Team Fortress 2, for example: It's difficult to find a server where you just hop in and play without being bothered by ads, server offers, and pleas of donations to the server.

People complain about not having good servers to play on, but I say to them: Just make your own. Take the time to learn how, it pays off in the future. You have to take action to change things you don't like. And eventually, you find like-minded people and you form a community.

These days, server owners are trying to compete really hard for attention with ridiculous ASCII server title banners and flashy signs when really, all people want to do is to hop in and play.