The Thesis

Howdy great friends and trusted companions.

As you know I have been working on my Thesis and I thought I would tell you some more about it.  First let met get something out of the way.  I didn’t make the deadline so I am going to keep working on it until august.

The thesis is about Player types. Im focusing on Yee’s playertypes, but for familiarity lets use Bartles more famous player types in this post. Im focusing on the Explorer and Achiever types and defining them by what Motivates them and what Play Patterns they have.

For example the Achiever player type is motivated by getting a head in the game and its play pattern is collecting stuff… That allows him to get ahead in the game.

What Im am doing is making a game that has a few features that appeal to the Explorer definition and a few that appeal to the Achiever definition. Im using a Patterns in Game design to pick the patterns that are most similar to the Motivations and Play Patterns.

When the game is complete I will interview a test group and determine what player type they are based on aquestionnaires. When I have determined what player type they are they will be forced to play the awesome game. The game will then logg what the player does and tell me if the player type acts according to the definition set by Bartle and Yee.

What is interesting, in my opinion, is watching how the player types act in-game.  Bartle opposed this type of experiment saying one can never know the motives of an action by just watching it. He has a very valid point, but I cant find a source that has actively watched how playertypes act in-game. And even though I wont get any information on their motivations, I might see actual play patterns instead of theoretical ones. Prior examinations have only been made by interviews, questionnaires and polls so the player type definitions are based upon only asking and not observing.

PS. Don’t tell anyone, but I’m actually more interested in making a cool game than actually completing my thesis.

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