Let my Bartle go

Richard Allan Bartle (born 10 January 1960 in Ripon, England) is a British writer, professor and game researcher, best known for being the co-creator of MUD1 (the first MUD) and the author of the seminal Designing Virtual Worlds. He is one of the pioneers of the massively multiplayer online game industry.

It’s 1996 and Bartle publishes a paper titled Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit Muds in which he describes how he identified four player types – achievers, explorers, socializers, and killers – by analyzing a “…long, heated discussion which ran from November 1989 to May 1990 between the wizzes (ie. highly experienced players, of rank wizard or witch) on one particular commercial MUD in the UK (Bartle, 1985).”

Fast forward some 15 years…

It’s 2012 and Bartle delivers a talk about his work on player types at GSummit, the biggest event in the gamification industry (see featured video). Watching the video, I couldn’t help but feel a little sad for Bartle. All the British irony and accent, couldn’t mask the hurt I heard in Bartle’s voice as he stood on stage and tried to explain (perhaps for the millionth time) the following key points:

Gamification is NOT a game

Most game designers / experts / theorists / writers / researchers can’t stand the notion of Gamification. Even the mention of the word, makes them feel uncomfortable. For them, gamification can be compared to someone claiming they can conduct an orchestra by flapping their hands around. Bartle is a skillful conductor who orchestrated a beautiful piece about player types which was unfortunately mixed by some Gamification DJ into a best selling pop hit. Gamification, in its misinterpretation of Bartle’s work, catapulted Bartle into the spotlight of a community he never wanted to be part of.

Just because something works, DOESN’T make it right

If you watch Bartle’s talk, he starts by saying that his player type methodology was intended for games but somehow works for gamification. BUT (and this is a BIG but), just because something works doesn’t make it right. Gamification has taken Bartle’s player type methodology at face value. There isn’t a single presentation on gamification these days that doesn’t include the (in)famous Bartle player types graph. The world is divided into two kinds of people – those who divide the world into two kinds of people, and those who don’t. Bartle’s player types graph appeals to our need for order, for categorization, for putting people into “boxes” so that we can cater to their needs, so that we know how to interact with them, and we can anticipate their next move. I’ve yet to see a presentation that included Bartle’s player types slide and then followed up with a slide that says what you can actually do after you’ve figured out that your target audience includes achievers, explorers, socializers, and killers. It’s like saying that you’re target audience includes men and women.

A methodology, NOT a solution

Here’s the punch line. Walk into any boardroom full of suits trying to figure out if gamification is good for their business and tell them about Bartle’s four player types. You should be saying something like “In order to successfully integrate gamification into your business you must first UNDERSTAND your users. According to Richard Bartle (a distinguished professor, yada, yada, yada) there are four player types – achievers, explorers, socializers, and…”. I guarantee you that by the time you hit them with “Killers”, they’ll be eating out of your hand. Instantly, their eyes will open wide and they’ll start jamming together on this piece of anecdotal science you just introduced into their boring lives. Now add something about how killers love competition and you can sell them on the idea of adding a leaderboard to their website. Congratulations, you made a sale! That is the real reason why Bartle’s player types work for gamification…because it sells gamification.

Why is that so bad you may ask…and that’s a very good question.

It’s because it makes us (gamification folks) lazy. Why work hard to understand Bartle’s work when he’s already done the hard work for us? Bartle created a methodology for understand player types in games because he was curious about who plays games and why. The four player types he uncovered are but ONE instance of his methodology which is really a way of segmenting the world around us (into categories) based on certain characteristics / attributes. Machine learning algorithms do it automatically and in multiple dimensions (not just x and y) as part of many applications we used today…they do it to “make sense” of the world, to show you just the right ad, propose the right music, and more.

If we continue to make mindless use of research in general, and Bartle’s work specifically, two things are sure to happen:

1. People will get tired of hearing about the same thing over and over again. Once clients realize that besides the cool sounding descriptive types, there’s no real methodology in place that they can use to create a more appealing / successful gamification project…well, let’s just say I don’t think they’ll be happy…

2. Gamification research will stagnate – there won’t be a need to find new ways of understanding users, players, or people in general, because we’ll always revert back to our true and tested “science.”

Instead, we need ways to personalize the gamified experience, to step away from clearly delineating our users / players, to understand that it’s not just about the player but also about the environment / context and the relationship between the two. Our users / players are members of more than one type “cluster” – they may belong to multiple types – at any given situation / context. For example, they may be achievers when it comes to making a sale, but they are explorers when it comes to engaging others in a meeting. I think they deserve a personalized, context-aware, gamified experience. Or we could just call them “killers” and be done with it.