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.