Personality & Gaming - A Becker College Response Piece.
- Alejandro L. Ruata
- Jan 21, 2018
- 8 min read
Updated: Aug 17, 2020
Hello all! To those who happen upon this piece and are not currently students or staff of Becker College, let me explain what this blog (at least for a few months) will entail. I will be using it for my “Serious Game Projects” course, responding to questions, articles, and – most importantly – playing my part to help conceptualize and rationalize ideas for fun “Serious” games with other students in my class “pod”. I may take the time in another post to discuss what serious games are, how they’re utilized, and their importance in the video game industry as part of the greater global community… but that day isn’t today. Instead… I want to talk about myself a bit.
Specifically, I want to talk about myself in relation to something called the Unified Model. To be brief, the Unified Model (I may refer to it simply as, the “model”, from here on out) is a combination of gamer play style models, created by Bart Steward and derided from models created by the likes of Bartle, Caillois, Lazzaro, Bateman – as well as the game design models of Edwards and Hunicke/LeBlanc/Zubek. The link to the original article that this post will be responding to is found in the link below.
The intention behind the model is to better understand the kind of gamer you will be based on the results of the Myers-Briggs Personality test (you know what I’m talking about, the 16 personalities that people can fall under, link below…). Essentially, understanding one’s personality is key in understanding one’s preference and pleasure for and from gaming.
Upon taking the test, I came out as an INFJ-T (The Advocate, with the role of Diplomat and the strategy of Constant Improvement https://www.16personalities.com/profiles/84162a2fd176d). First off, let me just say that I don’t believe in personality tests… I’m me, all my flaws, faults, quirks, and idiosyncrasies are mine and mine alone. So, believe me, I didn’t expect much from a ridiculous personality test I was forced to take for my school… then I read the results. After plenty of “oh *%$!” moments (“…if their zeal gets out of hand, they can find themselves exhausted, unhealthy and stressed.” That is completely me.) in my mind, I concluded that, while I am in fact still me, still one of a kind… maybe there was something to this personality test thing after all. Of course, as they warn, it wasn’t all correct (“Diplomats embrace travel as readily as anyone…” I am so tired of travel, I don’t even want to get into it.), but enough of it was that it warranted me taking an honest effort to compare my results to the Unified Model presented in Ben’s Gamasutra article.
A word of disclaimer here, Ben explicitly warns in his article that the Unified Model was meant more for online gamers who play among actual people than single player gamers, like me. It doesn’t mean the model is useless if you play more single player games than not, it just means you need to take the time to understand why results may be slightly off or, in some cases, why some results need to be interpreted a little differently than normal.
According to the unified model, I was found to be an Idealist/Socializer/Narrativist gamer; this feels quite right for me. My love for playing video games comes from the escapism of diving into a new world and getting lost in it (the same as I would do when I start on a new book of fiction).
My best example is my current example, “Assassin’s Creed: Origins”. I have a very busy schedule now, so I’m nowhere near finished with the mammoth sized action/adventure game with RPG elements, but every free moment I have (few and far between) is being spent with Bayek and his trials and tribulations across Egypt. Let me talk a bit about how I play, and hopefully you’ll see why I find myself so easily falling into the category of the model Bart assumed people of my personality type would reside in.
I’m a 100% gamer. When I buy a game, I intend to play it to completion… to a point. In the case of Origins, I fully intend to complete the story, to explore every corner of Egypt, to visit every location there is (and boy, there are a lot of locations to visit), to partake in every side-quest and Easter egg, to collect every collectible that affects the percentage completion of the game, and… you know what… essentially, I intend to play until I have reached 100% completion of the game (as stated above).
You know what I don’t bother with though? I don’t bother with the trophies/achievements Origins has to offer, any I get because of the things I do bother to do are merely dressing to confirm what I already know I went out of my way to do in-game (“in-game” is the key word here). Achievements to, say, kill 2000 Roman Soldiers (not a real achievement/trophy, just an example) – a gameplay achievement, of repetitive actions with no consequences to you or the world you’re inhabiting – is not something I will sit down with the intention of doing.
I play games to be part of the world, not to mess with it. A perfect example from my past is related to the game “The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction” for the PS2, GameCube, and Xbox. It’s a great game, by the by, still worth checking out in 2018 if you haven’t already. Anyway, I used to play this game all the time with friends from back in the day… but I always found myself bored unless I played it by myself. Sure, my friends found ways to bring out the hilarity in the game’s programming (the human AI was admittedly real fun to mess with, and the actions and animations of some foes could make the battles a laugh riot) … but in my mind, they weren’t “doing” anything. The story wasn’t advancing, I wasn’t getting the characters motivations or backgrounds or feelings, it was just destruction. And yes, the game is called Ultimate Destruction, but when I played alone (to advance the plot and see the game through to completion) the destruction had meaning and purpose – Hulk Buster fights were tense, the Abomination was a fierce adversary worthy of all of Hulk’s power to stop, and the military was a constant thorn on the players side in practically every mission. Destruction was given purpose and meaning to a licensed superhero game, Hulk was an unstoppable powerhouse and his enemies rose to meet the challenge head on.
I extend this kind of gaming to even the clothing my character wears. Back to Origins, Bayek is a Medjay, Medjay’s have badges representative of their rank that is recognized by all in Egypt. Many of the costumes in Origins hide the badge, therefore I don’t bother with them (with some exceptions, marauder disguises are appropriate in marauder territory where I want to “blend in”). It doesn’t affect anything in-game, all characters still recognize Bayek as Medjay, with or without the badge present, but in my state of mind, in my attempts to keep everything in the game world consistent and canonical, I don’t switch costumes when I’m playing seriously. The game also features the ability to wear the infamous white hood or not, I choose to don it most times except at story points where I know Bayek is interacting with friends and loved ones.
This isn’t to say I wish that all games only provide “canon” wear for characters; at the end of the day you’re playing a video game, and it’s nice to have the opportunity to let loose and go hog wild by having Bayek ride a Final Fantasy Chocobo, or dressing Hulk by as Mr. Fixit and terrorizing the city with zippy one liners and gauntlets made of cars. It’s like reading a book and imagining yourself in it (kinda like a Mary-Sue… but that’s a whole other topic).
I won’t go on… but I think you start to get the picture of the type of gamer I am. It’s why I was impressed with the Model presented by Bart. Where I start to take a little issue, is not with how he lumps people into gamer categories… but the games themselves.
Most games can be anything to anyone. I’ll keep this simple, let’s take the Uncharted series as an example since Bart mentions it at one point in his article. It’s mentioned as the ideal game for Killers and Achievers (gamers who play to mess with players – for single players, this can be equated to AI, not just other people - and for achievements). To think of Uncharted in just the manner presented by Bart is to miss the point of the mass appeal games like this garner. Uncharted can easily appeal to gamers of all spectrum's in the model. While Uncharted does have a wonderful and fully realized multiplayer mode, we can’t forget the well crafted single player stories found in every Uncharted game. Players with “Narrativist” sensibilities like me still get prime enjoyment from an Uncharted game with the story, characters, the in-game treasures, and Easter eggs.
Explorers (gamers who enjoy testing the limits of the world and gain understanding of the world at large) can also derive a lot of enjoyment out of an Uncharted game. You may ask how, considering the series is very linear and there isn’t much exploring off the beaten path (only very recently has that become a feature in Uncharted single player). But, as I said earlier, in the case of single player gamers, you must take this model and reinterpret certain elements of it. How can players like those in the link below not be explorers.
https://www.youtube.com/user/TheSeraphim17 - take the time to explore some of this guy’s videos – of Uncharted or otherwise – to get what I’m trying to say about people getting what they want to get out of games. Warning for adult language.
“Ultimately, it's all about achieving a strategic understanding of the system as a whole thing”. Bart’s article says that is what explorer gamers strive for… but they can do that in hundreds of games, just as achievers can find pleasure in hundreds of different games, and artisans and idealists can do so as well, etc. Gaming was meant to bring in people of all kinds and personalities, to box games in categories related to personality is to put a limit on the likes and dislikes of a personality. And while that can be assumed to a point, never take for granted the versatility of human beings.
It’s why I can find enjoyment in achievement and killer based games and mini-games like the Assassin Creed Multiplayer (for Brotherhood, Revelations, III, and IV: Black Flag) despite the fact they don’t appeal to my core gamer sensibilities. Games are fun, and people could find themselves in the mood for different things at different times.
Ultimately, I find this model to be a great achievement by Bart Stewart. I don’t think it’s fair to try any shove games into one category or another in terms of this model however. People are capable of liking whatever they want for their own reasons that don’t necessarily have to fit into the intent of the designers who first created the game. Understanding the wants and needs of players based on personality however, is where this model really shines.
I could talk about this for hours… but I think this is long enough for a first post. I hope you enjoyed, check out this Lets Player when you have the chance and see how he hilariously takes the idealist/socializer gamer route, as well as aspects of other gamer personality categories with the Hitman series (warning for adult language).
Finally, apologies for not bringing up every aspect of the article. I planned only to talk about the bits I felt the need to discuss and expand and relate personal experiences about. This was not a review of the article or its content, just a thought exercise to attempt and understand its intent in relation to myself.
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