Which player type are you?

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Lately I have been doing some research on the Bartle taxonomy of player types and it's really interesting. If you haven't heard of it, it's a way of quantifying the different reasons why people play games that Richard Bartle came up with after noting how there was disagreement about that.

Here is a chart of the 4 types:


In a nutshell, here is a description of the four types:

Killers play to fight, preferably against other players, and they thrive on competition.
Achievers are there to get achievements, win the game, and/or get a high score.
Explorers are there to find new things by exploring the world and/or the mechanics and sometimes exploit it.
Socializers are there for talking to other players more so then playing the game.

They interact in interesting ways too:

Achievers hate being killed yet they are also a decent challenge to kill, so they make for great targets for the killers. The achievers hate being killed though because it gets in the way of their progress. This means that more achievers causes an increase in killers and more killers causes a decrease in achievers.

Explorers don't mind being killed by killers very much and they are often quite powerful because of their deep understanding of the game, this means that killers tend to dislike them. Explorers are loved by achievers though because all the tricks and exploits the explorers find often find their way to the achievers which use them to help them achieve their goals. If there are enough killers to get in the way of exploration though then the explorers dislike that.

Socializers have an internal feedback loop, the more there are the more people there are to talk to and the less there are the less people there are to talk to. They dislike killers though, because they get in the way of the socializing.

The YouTube channel Extra Credits made some great videos on the topic if anyone is interested.




I myself am an explorer, I love to find every little secret and learn every mechanic in a game and I have found some pretty powerful ones, although I try to refrain from anything that could be considered cheating in multiplayer and I also don't mind being killed much. My 13 year old brother is a killer, he loves competition and he is very good at winning. My 11 year old sister is an achiever, she plays for the stated in game goals. This explains a lot about the dynamics of what games we play and what we do in them, and I have found it quite interesting to learn about. For example, it explains why I'm so hyped about the coming release of Outer Wilds which is a game entirely about exploration made for explorers.

So which type of player are you?

Last edited by mikeman7918 on 09 Jun 2016, 10:39 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Hmm, I suppose I'd be classified as the "killer" type, definitely. With some explorer mixed in.

I'm very rarely interested in story-related stuff (provided I even notice it) and am usually after a challenge. The harder, the better. Things like bullet hell games (the really nasty ones) or roguelikes or whatever... if it promises to give me a game over 10000 times in a row, I'm probably interested, as there's extreme satisfaction in beating something like that, but also it's the thing that'll let me increase my skill. As a consequence of this, most "normal" games are too easy now to hold my attention.

Once in-game I tend to be extremely impatient (can be bad) and will tend to use what I call a berserker style of combat in basically everything. Goes for single-player and multiplayer content. Particularly fighting games. The more agitated I get, the faster and more berserk I'll become. I've never been beaten in my fully berserk-ified state, but I cant just do that at will. I have to be *really* agitated for that one to happen. I prefer to avoid it, it's not exactly a fun state of mind. Other than that I'm known for speed and aggression.

Downside to this though is that I'm not exactly good for things like team strategies in games that involve teams, because I absolutely will just charge at things (friends of mine find this very entertaining), as that's the first thing that's going to occur to me to do. I mostly play singleplayer games though, and in those I can launch at things whenever I want, so that works out well enough. And while I do like exploration (depends on the game type though, I prefer procedurally generated games for this because it means the exploration aspect never goes away no matter how many times the game is replayed) I always prefer to do that alone. If someone wants to join me for the combat side of things, well... that's fine, if the game is going to scale it so the challenge doesnt get sucked out. But when it comes to exploration, I'll always go it alone, so that I dont have to wait for anyone, as I have no patience. I dont get interested in exploration when it comes to more passive games though (well, there are exceptions). Even with something like Minecraft (a favorite game of mine) I often add in small mods that drastically increase the general threat level of the monsters in the game... it insures that my adventures will be interesting and that the challenge will be there. It's not like the world has to be drowning in monsters, but when they DO show up I want them to be able to put up a real fight.



On the other side of things though, my personality when CONVERSING with other players doesnt really show any of this, so long as I'm not directly challenged by someone. I never SOUND like any of these things I describe; I'm always polite as hell to everyone, and even in something like, say, a PVP-enabled realm in a persistent online world, I'll never actually initiate combat, because in some games there are often reasons to enter zones like that even if you DONT want to fight, and I figure, I dont want to ruin anyone's experience... maybe they're only there because some damn quest is forcing them to and they just want to be done with it and move on. If they want to fight me, they can start things themselves. Might seem like a silly way of looking at it, but that's how I tend to look at everything when dealing with other people. I never, *ever* do things to ruin the experiences of others in multiplayer games.


I never cheat at anything (what's the point of playing if you're just going to cheat? I'll never understand that...) and will also tend to min-max the hell out of everything in games where that is applicable (particularly roguelikes, wether they are turn-based or games like Isaac). I dont grind though. Never, ever grind.

"Explorer"

I explored all of WoW, and then completely lost interest.

You're not the only one.


....well, okay, I didnt explore ALL of it, I lost interest long before then. But the principle is the same. Sort of. Or I'm just caffeinated.

That's interesting, because when I play Minecraft I tend to install mods that add interesting new mechanics to master (especially electricity and machine mods) which allow me to hide in my hole in the ground and tinker and/or mods that add cool new worlds to explore (like Galacticraft, which is my all-time favorite Minecraft mod).

I will elaborate a bit about how truly "explorer" I am. It takes a long time for me to get familiar with a game to the point of exploiting it and also many games don't have any mechanics worth exploiting, but these are some of my favorite things that I have explored and exploited in games:

In Minecraft I have become very good at redstone and exploiting block update bugs to make amazing machines. These are not just your garden variety traps and secret doors, I have managed to make certain things smaller then any that I have ever seen which are like it and I have even made an amazing system which takes a binary input and converts it into a signal strength which has an evil twin that turns a signal strength into a binary output. If I put my mind to it I could probably build a computer given my knowledge of redstone and computing.

In Space Engineers I have figured out how to make a ship that can regenerate any damage done to it, although it would cost resources from within the ship. My prototype withstood all the crazy tests my friends threw at it without so much as a scratch, it was just a prototype though and the technology could still use improvements. One awesome thing about such ships is that if you pipe the resources into them then they can literally build themselves from just a tiny starting structure given the right blueprint, so once I develop this I will be able to quickly manufacture one of these nearly invincible ships on any server which are limited only by the amount of spare parts they can hold.

In Space Agency (an IOS game) I have exploited multiple mechanics in a complex way to create a rocket engine with an arbitrarily large amount of fuel. Well, it's not really an engine, it's a greenhouse and a solar panel that exploit the undocking ejection force, some strange rules about escaping atmosphere generating propulsion, and a life support bug. It works as an engine though if you know how to operate it and lately I have had one of these things on a long mission to try to break the game with speed and distance while not using any fuel except the minuscule almost negligible amount of water needed to operate the greenhouse, and my ship hasn't even made a dent in it's supply yet.

I'm no hacker though, in a multiplayer environment I avoid using unfair exploits. For example I have found that in Planetary Annihilation there is a bug and a balance probelem which combined causes flamethrower tanks dropped on a commander from orbit be a super over powered attack that is nearly impossible to defend against and super easy to execute, but I have only ever used it once and I don't use my exploits to make the game less fun for others.


It's interesting seeing how the ways these player types tend to interact predict how my siblings and I interact in games. My 11 year old sister, my 13 year old brother, and I play a lot of games together. Usually my killer brother turns against my sister and I early on, being independent and fighting against everyone else in any way possible always ready with weapons. When we are on a team though with his skill with strategy and my understanding of a game we are a force to be reckoned with.

My sister and I are almost always in a team because she is an achiever and they tend to benefit from explorers. She benefits from me because I can help her achieve goals, and I find it fun to help with that because it gives me a reason to use everything I learned from all the "science" I tend to do in games. It's win-win, so we stick together.

A mix of explorer and socializer, as far as I can tell. Slightly more the latter than the former; I get bored very quickly with winning if I don't have people to talk about it with and love games that emphasize teamwork. In single-player games my preferences are heavily skewed towards RPGs that have a lot of dialogue, social interaction... I'm a huge Bioware and Fallout (the Black Isle/Obsidian ones) fan in particular. In multiplayer games I'll spend a lot of time just standing around talking, or helping people out. I tend to prefer cooperative gameplay over competitive.

The explorer thing is because I tend not to care much about XP, items, K/D, achievements etc. Winning's great, but I don't need it all the time. I also can't do sandbox-y games (e.g. Minecraft) at all, because they feel soulless. There's no love put into making the world.

Not sure we're I'd fall, but mission-driven.

Most likely about 75% achiever, 25% explorer.

Most story-based games I focus almost entirely on the main missions but also try to achieve as much side-missions as possible.

I typically don't finish every side-activity but have at least half of it done.

On AC IV I could spent half my time doing the mssions, the other half exploring every single island and 100%ing them all.

By storie's finish I had almost every island gold save for just a couple and due to this about 75% completion.

Apply this to every game I play.

Every other game is a mix between story > side activity > exploring.

50% > 35% > 15%

Multiplayer is almost entirely meaningless to me aside from home games with family/friends or co-op campaign.

No Xbox live or any sort of online gaming.

Prefer open-world sandboxes as they allow such flexible play.

Of those four, I'd say I'm an explorer (though a very casual one). I'm not goal-orientated - I'm all about enjoying the game and seeing what I can do with it.

My husband is what he calls a 'completionist'. In those categories, an achiever. He likes to finish games to 100% and will happily play through multiple times to do so, or keep a game going for an excessive amount of time just to reach top levels. He loves trophies and achievements. He's also happy to use cheats and walkthroughs to get the achievements that he struggles with. I don't understand it at all. To me, that seems incredibly boring and also pointless, but it's what makes him happy.

The only cheats I've ever used in a game are on The Sims, to get more money to build a bigger house or to mess around with family trees and genetics. I don't like the idea of actually cheating to get ahead in a game, or being told what to do by a person/game designer/walkthrough.

I'm actually playing his game, currently, and I would say I'm somewhere between explorer and achiever (but what's the point in exploring if you don't intend to achieve?). Although I suppose it was a little different back in the day, because the current game lets you have up to three different personae (characters) at a time, so I have one for exploring, and one for achieving. It's really easy to perma-die, so I tend to do most of my exploring with my throwaway guy.

The game seems so vast and twisting, and there are so many secrets and strange puzzles, I feel like I'm only scratching the surface. Which...literally I am, since I don't delve underground very often.

Definitely an explorer, I have games where I'm like 50 hours in and done not even a quarter of the story or missions, that's why I like open worlds or games where it's a never ending 'objective'. Even things like yoshi's island I'll play the same levels over and over to absorb the details and drink in the charming atmosphere!

I don't like to lose.

I believe in good sportsmanship, though.

Definitely an explorer. And very tenacious. I don't rage quit. I enjoy nothing more in gaming than an improbable comeback. I'm at my best when the odds are against me. My most dangerous when I have a sliver of health left. Unfortunately the opposite is true sometimes too, I can get complacent when I'm well on top. I don't enjoy easy games and I don't enjoy dominating inferior players. I like a challenge.

I am definitely an explorer, since I love exploring outside and am naturally curious. I love running around, finding all the secrets in games.

I trend most toward an explorer but I have a bit of achiever and killer as well. My killer aspects however do not extend to others players as I hate pvp combat. More often than not I prefer RPGs for the story, characters, and systems which is one of the reasons I love the Bravely series as it checks off all of those points for me.

I didn't know he had a game. What is it called?

mostly achiever, second choice would be explorer.
when i play i have a goal and i will kill those in the way of achieving said goal but killing is not my main objective.
i will explore to obtain and exploit but it is always goal oriented for me, not necessarily to understand the game on a deeper level.