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Comment by mettamage | Hacker News Reader

Psychologists could learn a lot from humans if they'd start building games and observe them.

Also, game-designers could learn a lot from psychologists. Whenever I heard Bartle's taxonomy for the first time during a game studies course, my question was (and still is): why is a taxonomy the best way to capture this? In a personality research course it became clear to me that the biggest successful models are dimensional in nature (e.g. five factor model/big 5) they are not taxonomies.

I'd love for more psychologist/personality researchers to team up with game-designers. I think it could advance some scientific discoveries into human behavior.

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The test as I created it (that site uses a copy of the questions, those were written by Brandon Downey) asked 30 question evenly spread pitting e.g. Explorer against Socializer, so you ended up with a score that said e.g. you prefer Explorer 100% against any other.

Back when the test was relevant (around 2000?) there was lots of multiplayer games (MUDs) and so you could enter what MUDs you were playing after you got your score -- it was interesting to see the averages for each aspect matching up with type of MUD (e.g. PVE versus PVP versus purely social/RP).

I also tried to match the results against a volunteered MBTI: http://mud-dev.zer7.com/2001/8/20412/#post20412

Yes, but if you're limited in your choices in the game environment, what good is psychology?

For example, one of the questions:

Which is more enjoyable to you?

- Killing a big monster

- Bragging about it to your friends

Umm... neither? What is a 'monster'? Is it one of the last remaining megafauna, the rest having been slaughtered to extinction by other gamers? Is it a sentient creature (say, a dragon) that happens to be rather angry, but can be reasoned with?

What if I'd rather study the 'monster', like a zoologist might, in order to discover more about its life? (Do 'monsters' lead their own existence in a gaming world?)

There should be more to gaming than killing!

There is a lot more.

There is Animal Crossing

There are dress up games

Race games

Games that detail the high school lives of people

Fifa

Just to name a few

> my question was (and still is): why is a taxonomy the best way to capture this? In a personality research course it became clear to me that the biggest successful models are dimensional in nature (e.g. five factor model/big 5) they are not taxonomies.

The types are labels for the extremes of a dimensional analysis of motivation:

    INTEREST GRAPH

    Consider the following abstract graph:


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

https://mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm

ed: much like archetypes in personality tests

I wrote a mini-thesis halfway through my masters in cognitive science. I used a 3D virtual environment (basically, a FPS video game) to study curiosity, learning, and knowledge graphs.

It was cool. I learned a lot.

I'm gonna do more.

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