288: Achiever, Explorer, Socializer, Killer

James Bishop

Spoony Bard
Jan 12, 2011
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Achiever, Explorer, Socializer, Killer

The four kinds of players - symbolized by the suits in a deck of cards - can be found in just about any videogame, even one as straightforward as Minecraft.

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DPunch4

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May 6, 2009
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Ummm.. I hope you do know that there is survival multiplayer with almost everything from single player. The only thing there isn't is the 'Nether'. There's mining and creepers and everything else. Different servers have different settings, our Escapia server is set to the hard difficulty I believe. Zombies and other mobs kill you quickly if you're not careful.

Just making sure you knew that.
 

atomictoast

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Aug 7, 2009
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All I want is for you to sent the background of this article to Notch so he can make these cards real.
 

Formica Archonis

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Nov 13, 2009
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(Looks at picture.) A stick could be called a club. A shovel could be called a spade. A pile of redstone dust is red and vaguely heart-shaped.

Props to the artist for trying to match suits!
 

antman9000

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Jun 13, 2008
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ive played multiplayer survival, its like the only thing i do play. when it went from alpha to beta, cause all the servers werent updated, everything was in the nether. now that was some crazy multiplayer fun
 

DoomyMcDoom

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Jul 4, 2008
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I filled the ground under someone's castle with dynamite... I think that's some club work worth noting... hehehe, since it was like... 4 layers thick... made a BIG HOLE :D... but yeah I usually spend my time making huge obsidian fortresses... or gigantic mining networks... pit mines strip mines... the likes... highways between peoples places of construction... huge torch laden navigational markers on hills... stuff like that...
 

Inyssius

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Jan 27, 2010
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Survival mode has been implemented and more-or-less fully functional in multiplayer since, what, November?

Might want to do a little bit more basic fact-checking before you hit "publish", Escapist dudes.
 

ItsAPaul

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Mar 4, 2009
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Theres only two types of online players - normal and troll. The first wants to play the game, the second gets jollies from your misery by finding ways the developers left to intentionally give other players a bad time. I don't have to tell anyone that the second category largely out numbers the first in any game, and is the reason I don't bother with multiplayer of any sort if it's not LAN.

Oh, and play the game you're writing about sometime. Multiplayer's been out for a long time.
 

Cyberjester

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Oct 10, 2009
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ItsAPaul said:
Theres only two types of online players - normal and troll. The first wants to play the game, the second gets jollies from your misery by finding ways the developers left to intentionally give other players a bad time. I don't have to tell anyone that the second category largely out numbers the first in any game, and is the reason I don't bother with multiplayer of any sort if it's not LAN.

Oh, and play the game you're writing about sometime. Multiplayer's been out for a long time.
Pretty much this, although I'm going to state that anyone with a public server almost needs their castle blown up. Public means people can do what they want, and some people's idea of awesome is a dystopian style war torn map. Which means no intact castle.
 

madman485

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Apr 10, 2009
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ummm yeah survival multiplayer has been out for a couple months i think.

also, these archetypes make it sound like everybody who plays video games (except hearts) sound like dicks.
 

OnlyIxon

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Mar 15, 2010
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Hey there, James Bishop here.

A few things:

1. Due to the nature of The Escapist's editorial calendar, this was submitted either before or on the day of Beta going live. :) Thus the seemingly strange comments about multiplayer.

2. To "check my facts," please read: http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Survival_(Game_Mode)

A version has been available but the actual SMP only became available on the 20th of December with the move to Beta. This article was written specifically about Alpha.

Otherwise, enjoy.
 

Lancer873

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Oct 10, 2009
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DPunch4 said:
Ummm.. I hope you do know that there is survival multiplayer with almost everything from single player. The only thing there isn't is the 'Nether'. There's mining and creepers and everything else. Different servers have different settings, our Escapia server is set to the hard difficulty I believe. Zombies and other mobs kill you quickly if you're not careful.

Just making sure you knew that.
Even then, there's a hell-mode setting on the server's text file, so the nether is technically included (you're just unable to have both because in Single-Player, the two worlds load separately, and in multi-player it would cause a LOT of lag to have two worlds being run at once.

But yeah, there's a Survival multiplayer, I've got a server set up. Still a cool article, but the dood seems to have only played the free version. =\
 

vxicepickxv

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Sep 28, 2008
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madman485 said:
ummm yeah survival multiplayer has been out for a couple months i think.

also, these archetypes make it sound like everybody who plays video games (except hearts) sound like dicks.
The spades are okay too.

I'm pretty much a pretty solid heart/spade, but sometimes I get a bit of diamond in me. I don't really like to be a total jerk, so I'm pretty much not a club at all.
 

DPunch4

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May 6, 2009
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I'm sorry but survival was out much before beta as well, the single play gets updated with the multiplayer, both are buggy, however the multiplayer is more buggy for many reasons.

I'm sorry if the wiki makes it sound otherwise.
 

The Random One

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May 29, 2008
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Oh man, Bartle. Yes. There's one guy more games should know about. He was writing about MMOs back when WoW was a glint in the glint in the glint of someone's eye. I mean, he was writing about MMOs when he made it! The four players suits are a genial division that makes sense in pretty much any large playing community. Knowing one's suit should be as second nature as knowing one's favourite genre. (I'm a spade, almost 100%.)

I remember when I stopped playing Urban Dead, and kept running into other games that I thought were much better but whose very creators thought very highly of it. I couldn't understand the massive fandom to a game I thought was drab at best. Then I read Bartle's article and I suddenly understood everything. Urban Dead had reached one of the equilibrium states he predicted: achievers and killers in equal amounts, balancing each other but weeding out socializers and explorers (like me). The randomly generated map and limited item selection didn't hold any appeal for me/us.

Obviously Minecraft is off the chart. A game based mostly on creation would appeal almost exclusively to explorers (a spade seems to be curiously fit for it, too) but would allow explorers' other suits to show up more. Bartle does mention explorers are key for a game to keep it from becoming stale, since they're the trailblazers that other suits follow, so maybe building it so everyone learns to act like one is the key behaviour here. It's definitively none of the behaviours Bartle predicted in his article, at least none of the obvious one.

ItsAPaul said:
Theres only two types of online players - normal and troll. The first wants to play the game, the second gets jollies from your misery by finding ways the developers left to intentionally give other players a bad time.
Far from me to think that one of the most important game theorists' most famous work cannot be disproved by a single sentence by some guy who doesn't bother to type apostrophes, but I respectfully disagree. There's an issue in which different people's way of playing the game clash even though they're both in the spirit of the game. For instance, maybe a bunch of people are in a room and some guy shows up and kills them. The people in the room are Hearts making some sort of role-playing event and think the other guy is a troll for killing them. The guy is an Achiever thinking the other people are trolls for blocking one of the game's main passageways and not bothering to fight back.

Although I must say one of the few things I dislike about Bartle's article is how it makes little difference between a killer of the kind that enjoys challenges provided by other players and a plain griefer. He seems to gather them in the same package, even though they're quite different beasts. A 'good' killer is interested in the welfare of the game, since using its tool to harm other players is what gives his him thrill, while a 'bad' killer, or griefer, strives to damage other players' enjoyment of the game, while at the same time keeping himself from developing a connection from the game or community to keep the same from happening to himself. Minecraft has no leeways for clubs other than griefing, and while griefers will always exist, some may be unhappy 'good' killers looking for an explosive farewell after they decide this game does not hold their attention.
 

lleihsad

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Apr 9, 2009
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Not a bad article. It kind of got overshadowed by the Bartle paper you linked to, though. That shit is fascinating. I especially liked the analysis of the interactions between each pair of suites, complete with population-altering effects.
 

tehbeard

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Jul 9, 2008
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I'd also like to add that there is spleef for clubs to partake in.
http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Spleef

i know the article is written with regards to creative servers, but spleef can be built/played on survival severs as well.
 

Femaref

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May 4, 2008
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OnlyIxon said:
Hey there, James Bishop here.

A few things:

1. Due to the nature of The Escapist's editorial calendar, this was submitted either before or on the day of Beta going live. :) Thus the seemingly strange comments about multiplayer.

2. To "check my facts," please read: http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Survival_(Game_Mode)

A version has been available but the actual SMP only became available on the 20th of December with the move to Beta. This article was written specifically about Alpha.

Otherwise, enjoy.
The alpha also contained a working SMP with the exception of server inventory for at least the whole of november, if not before that. At least I remember having lots of fun on an SMP server way before beta hit. Alpha SMP was functional with the addition of health and killable mobs, and that was mid october.
 

whaleswiththumbs

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Feb 13, 2009
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This is a really good article. Definitely go read it. I wonder if Notch planned out all these intricacies when making it?