Abstract:

One key element for any successful game is to know the player that is interacting with the system. What are the players’ desires for that system? How does this player intend to interact with the system? Does this player want to interact with other players? How? When deciding elements for a gamified experience, the steps should be similar since a gamified experience is a group of game-based elements placed in a non-game environment trying to make the user more engaged with the system or with the activity being performed.

Among a number of player profile tests, Bartle, a game designer, and a game researcher, developed a simple, but yet very useful, way to understand his users inside the world of massive multiplayer online game, or MMO for short, where the player base loss motivated Bartle to further investigate and, as a result, a player taxonomy formed by 4 types arouse and was widely used and studied. Later, other authors and Bartle himself ended up widening the number of types to better understand the player base. Based on Bartle’s early work, 2 authors created an online test that was widely used but relied heavily on a specific type of game, the Role-Playing Game and, therefore, was not accessible to every player, or even to non-players, for the language was not familiar to many of these users. With these elements in mind, and trying to create a starting point for gamified experiences that were custom built to the users within the system, the author of this paper tries to deliver a different test, one that could be used by gamers and non-gamers alike and could guide the person running the system to create more engagement simply by delivering elements that met users’ desire. The paper shows the process of developing and testing the new quiz and using it once it achieved desirable goals.

Keywords:

Bartle, gamification, test, quiz, player taxonomy, player type.