Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades

Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades

Evening, mortals, how goes life?

As much as I want to drop a metric ton of witty, smart-ass comments on you, I really can't think of any for once. I guess my comedic well has dried up for the time being, and the monsoon season won't roll around until it does. So, in the mean time, let's jump straight into some reading notes.

This week, I read "Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players who suit MUDs", written by Richard Bartle.

According to our friend Bartle, there are four main approaches to playing MUDs (Multi-User-Domains, or multiplayer games to you and me). These four approaches arise from the inter-relationship of two dimensions of playing style:

• action vs. interaction
• world-oriented vs. player-oriented

Through analysis of a conversation of a large number of highly skilled and invested MUD players, Bartle identified the four things that most MUD players enjoyed about playing MUDs:

1. Achievement within the game context (including levelling up, completing the game, etc.)
2. Exploration of the game (including exploring both the world and the game mechanics)
3. Socializing with others
4. Imposition upon others (basically causing stress to or upsetting other players)

These could then be refined down to four categories of MUD players:

• Achievers
• Explorers
• Socializers
• Killers

Bartle then related each of these to a suit in a standard deck of playing cards.

Achievers = Diamonds, trying to find riches within the game context.

Explorers = Spades, digging around the game to find what's there.

Socializers = Hearts, trying to forge relationships with other players.

Killers = Clubs, using any weapon (literal or otherwise) within the game context to harm others.

Individuals often overlap through multiple categories depending on mood and personal play style, but most will have a primary category, and most of their actions will ultimately contribute to their resulting goal.

Bartle then explained each category in a little more detail:

• Achievers: Point-gathering and levelling up is their main goal, and all is ultimately subservient to this.
• Explorers: They delight in having the game expose its internal machinations to them. They try progressively esoteric actions in out-of-the-way locations, looking for interesting features and figuring out how things work.
• Socializers: These people are interested in other people, and what they have to say. The game is merely a backdrop, a common ground where things happen to players. Inter-player relationships are important; empathising, sympathising, joking, entertaining, listening, and so forth.
• Killing: For them, there is generally no greater joy in a video game than causing others grief. They get their kicks from imposing themselves on others. This can be "nice" on occasion (i.e. busy-body do-gooding), but few people practise such an approach, because the rewards aren't very substantial. The more massive the distress caused by the killing, the greater the killer's joy at having caused it.

How many players of each category are present is dependant on the MUD. If too much focus is placed on one aspect, then the other aspects will often suffer as a result. Also, numbers of one type of group will most often affect the numbers of others, much like an ecosystem; more killers reduces the general population of a game, and a lower number of explorer will result in fewer achievers and killers. An increased population of foxes in an area will reduce the number of rabbits in the same area, leading to fewer foxes, leading to more rabbits.

As I mentioned earlier, these categories arise by the inter-relationship of two dimensions of playing style. This is how:

                                  ACTING
              Killers                |              Achievers
                                     |
                                     |
                                     |
                                     |
                                     |
          PLAYERS -------------------+------------------- WORLD
                                     |
                                     |
                                     |
                                     |
                                     |
              Socialisers            |              Explorers
                                INTERACTING

When I saw this in the reading, it blew my mind; this made everything clear to me.

A stable MUD is one in which the numbers of types of players is in equilibrium; this doesn't mean they are equal, but that over time, the ratio of numbers of players of each type stay roughly constant. It is up to the administrators of the MUD to maintain this balance, as well as to decide where the balance should be and why.

Changing the focus towards a more player-oriented game is easy enough: simply add more ways for players to interact with other players, such as through communicative methods.

Changing the focus towards a more world-oriented game often involves the opposite of this; give the players fewer ways to interact with each other, and more ways to interact with the world. Also, offer them a larger world, perhaps making it less likely to find other players.

Changing the focus towards interaction instead of action can often involve restricting player choices of courses of action, allowing implementation of pre-determined paths.

Changing the focus towards acting instead of interacting can make a game more repetitive and boring. More than action is required to stimulate a player playing games, as these actions need to have effects.

Unfortunately, this was as far as I got with the article. It continued on for a while longer, but, well, I was tired and very much convinced that I had the main points needed.

Overall, this was a good article in my opinion. The graph was an excellent reveal for me, allowing me to make sense of what Bartle was talking about with the two plains of playing style. The format makes sense, and allows us to categorise things, as we are always so happy to do. It almost feels like a horoscope to me, some horrific, scientific horoscope that charts every gamer's location within online multiplayer games.

Oh, and if you're curious, I would categorise myself as an Achiever, though it depends on my personal goal at the time. For example, if I'm playing just to spend time with my "Internet Friends", (people who I am unlikely to ever meet in real life), then I would be more of a Socializer, but only within our group. I'm still not very interested in socializing with others. This socialization with friends, however, often includes other factors: we might go exploring together to see what the game has for us, or try to achieve a new level within the game context, or, indeed, run around killing everything we see, often including each other.

That's all for now, mortals, hope you enjoyed reading this (though I doubt you did; let's face it, I'm not a writer, and this was a long one; think of all the things you could have been doing instead of reading this). Praise be to the Emperor of Mankind!