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Imagine you have just hit 'start' on a new first-person video game. You find yourself in a room facing a doorway with 'this way' written in large letters over the top. You take a very quick look around and notice a few closed chests and cupboards beside you and then a door behind you marked 'no entry'. You turn back toward the first door. Without thinking, answer the following question: what do you do now?In 1990, Dr Richard Bartle, the co-creator of the seminal online role-playing game Multi-User Dungeon (MUD), wrote an essay categorising the sorts of people who inhabited multiplayer adventures. He broke them up into four types: achievers, who like to level up and beat objectives; explorers, who just like to progress through the environment seeing new stuff; socialisers, who are really there to meet people; and killers who just need to subvert everything and ruin the experience for everyone else. His taxonomy of players would go on to become a hugely influential study of gaming habits, and can easily be applied to other genres beyond MUDs - you most likely recognise yourself among those categories.
But Bartle isn't the only academic to wonder about the types of people who play video games. There has been a really fascinating history of psychological profiling in this industry. It is possible, for example to categorise gamers along financial lines. In his series of essays entitled A New Taxonomy of Gamers, writer Mitch Krpata identifies two types of player: wholesale gamers, who see the value of games in their length, and simply wants to get as many hours as possible out of their purchase, and premium players, who value the intensity and quality of the experience. This is a very useful way of framing the current argument over titles like Firewatch and Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, which are short in terms of completion time, but very rich in terms of the universe and the experience they present to the player.
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