Richard Bartle

> 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

Richard just posted: >It occurred to me that if people are allowed to reformat the text of Designing Virtual Worlds, then perhaps I ought to provide it in a form more amenable to reformatting than .pdf is. I've therefore uploaded a .docx version to https://mud.co.uk/richard/DesigningVirtualWorlds.docx , for those readers who want to put it in a form that works on their phone, Kindle or US Letter paper (the .pdf is set up for A4). >The news that I released the book for free seems to have made the first page of Hacker News. There are about 35 comments on it, many of which I'd love to reply to but know how much of my life replying to the resulting counter-comments would take up.

I downloaded this and intend to read it over the coming weeks - at 950-odd pages, it's lengthy. Dr. Bartle is still one of the best thinkers on this subject. Also, his personal website is delightfully 90s-esque. https://mud.co.uk/richard/

This is an interesting update on Bartle's Taxonomy of Players (http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm) from back in the MUD days. Sadly, this article is a little dated if you check out the list of games used (Dark Ages of Camelot, Star Wars Galaxies). I would love to see results from a survey like this that used players from Farmville, Mafia Wars and Restaurant City.

Don't know what he wanted to talk about, but here's one I remembered off hand: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-machine All the old Infocom games were ported to this Engine and its existence is why they're so wonderfully well preserved nowadays and can be played in a really playable form with Frotz Also in the Adventure Game space: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCUMM The oriignal MUD was an engine, and there are hundreds of derivatives of MUD that are also engines, I recommend Richard Bartle's book for a really good history of it, I think it's free online. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-user_dungeon#Wider_access_and_earl… https://mud.co.uk/richard/DesigningVirtualWorlds.pdf Bartle's own words: > MUD was programmed in MACRO-10 assembler on a DecSystem-10 mainframe at Essex University, England, in the fall of 1978. Its author was a talented Computer Science undergraduate, Roy Trubshaw. Version I was a simple test program to establish the basic principles by which a shared world could be maintained. When it worked, Roy immediately started on version II, a text-based virtual world that would be instantly recognizable as such even today. It was also written in MACRO-10, a decision that led to its becoming increasingly unwieldy as more and more features were added. Because of this, in the fall of 1979 Roy made the decision to begin work on version III of the game. He split it in two: The game engine was written in BCPL (the fore-runner of C); the game world…

More UO nostalgia: I started playing UO when I was about 13. My parents paid the monthly fees for a few months, but I couldn't convince them to keep paying for it. ("Do your homework, Sean!") Frustrated, my friends and I found the free, independent, emulator-run servers and started playing on them. Finding the nuances between the free servers (called "shards"), we settled on one in particular and stayed there for the next few years. I got bored with playing pretty quickly -- I was never really good at games that required skill or huge amounts of time investment. I started talking with the shard staff, gained their trust, and "graduated" into being a moderator for the server when I was 14 by doing some minor policing (resolving disputes, busting people leveling up with macro programs like UOAssist, etc). I could warp anywhere and got to choose special colours of clothing and had this awesome counselor robe. Looking back, according to [1], I best fit a "socialiser" player. Then I got bored of simply moderating. There were a backlog of feature requests to the lone shard developer, who was busy trying to, y'know, have a family and work his day job. At the behest of the Italian couple who ran the server, I began developing for the shard when I was 15 (having not programmed before). I did lots of simple things like create weapons and funny items with special abilities [2], my favourite being a bag of skipping stones. Then I started doing more complicated things like recreate…

It's an inevitable side-effect of having more people, the community gets too big for everyone to know everyone any more and so a lot of community feeling gets lost. I've probably posted it before, but it seems like a good time to reference Richard Bartle's analysis of social dynamics in MUD communities again: http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm I think this is as good an overview of online community dynamics as any other I've seen in the last ~20 years online. By accident or design (more the former than the latter, I think), this yields quite similar insights to grid-group cultural theory, as discussed in the following: http://changingminds.org/explanations/culture/grid-group_culture.htm http://www.soa.org/files/pdf/2009-chicago-erm-ingram-02.pdf and http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0955768144 I have not got around to reading the book in the last link, but I like his other work that I've seen.

Blank and Berez were definitely thinking about p-machines when they designed the Z machine, and there is a hat tip in the 1980 Creative Computing article describing its inner workings. [1]: https://mud.co.uk/richard/htflpism.htm

Boy I have learned this stuff in the school of hard knocks. I remember reading about stuff like https://techtinkering.com/articles/sweet-16-the-6502-dream-machine-por… and https://mud.co.uk/richard/htflpism.htm from a very young age.

Link for Richard A Bartle's “How to Be a God”: https://mud.co.uk/richard/How%20to%20Be%20a%20God.pdf

“Designing Virtual Worlds” by Richard A. Bartle. Awesome site by the author (a legend) where you can download the PDF: https://mud.co.uk/dvw/.

Here is Bartle's actual announcement and download link: https://mud.co.uk/dvw/

There are different kind of online game players. There is an old write-up[1] about MUDs, the ancestors of modern MMORPGs. Players are categorized into 4 archetypes: hearts, clubs, diamonds, and spades, also called socializers, killers, achievers and explorers respectively. Socializers and killers are the extroverts. They play the game for the multiplayer aspect, socializers see the game as a communication platform while killers see it as a way to get attention. Achievers and explorers are the introverts, and for them, the multiplayer aspect is not really important. I have a few friends in the first category. They are very far from being socially isolated, even if they spend thousands of hours gaming. [1] https://mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm

The article Hearths, Clubs Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit Muds ( https://mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm ) looks at that aspect. The types of players the designers design for and the types of players that the game creates aren't always in alignment. One of the games that I've played over the years that specifically embraces this is Kingdom of Loathing.

This is a good time to drop a mention of the psychological analysis of the four types of MUD gamers[1] [1] http://mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm

Another purpose of the Z-machine is code size. The virtual machine instruction took up less space than the equivalent machine code. From “How to Fit a Large Program into a Small Machine”: > A good benchmark for the storage saved by rewriting Zork in ZIL is the Zork parser, which analyzes a player's English input: the parser for the PDP-10 occupies 1OK 36-bit words, while the Z-code parser, which is actually better functionally, occupies only 3K 8-bit bytes. http://mud.co.uk/richard/htflpism.htm

Wow, the original "4 types of players" paper is really, really good and also very detailed. Makes some interesting observations about the dynamics of those types of players in a shared game world. http://mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm Personally, I seem to be closest to the explorer type. I always liked single player games more, and I prefer well-written lore, depth and new things to discover over the mechanics or social aspect.

> So, even if highfalutin phrases like “virtual machine” weren’t yet tripping off the tongue of the average bedroom hacker, it wasn’t hard to divine what Infocom must be doing in the broad strokes. The specifics, however, were another matter. For, while Infocom didn’t hide the existence of a Z-Machine in the abstract, they had no vested interest in advertising how it worked. ... But plumbing the depths of a virtual machine whose very existence was only implicit was hard work This is extremely misleading. Sure, some of the depths weren't published, but Infocom published how the Z-machine worked in a variety of forums. Most accessible is "How to fit a large program into a small machine" by Marc S. Blank and S. W. Galley, published in Creative Computing, 1980. Creative Computing was widely read at the time. It explained how integers and strings were stored as well as the general approach. Blank was one of the key developers of Zork. You can view the paper here: https://mud.co.uk/richard/htflpism.htm Of course, it took some effort to work out the exact opcodes, but there was a lot of publicly-available information to start from.

> I also think people willingly participate because it's a way to substitute mediocre/subordinate social acceptance for the much more intermittent reward/thrill of genuine work. The drive to seek "intermittent rewards/thrills" isn't universal. Specifically, in people with naturally low dopamine responsivity[1][2], it's almost non-existent. Within this group, you don't tend to see anyone who enjoys casinos and/or casual-social-mobile games, for example; they experience no dopamine hit from one session, so they aren't drawn to replay. There's a categorization system of psychological reward profiles, originally derived from MMO play-styles, called the Bartle test (http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm). Of the four Bartle types, people with low dopamine responsivity are almost never "Achievers"--instead tending to focus on the other three. Here's the description of the category: > Achievers regard points-gathering and rising in levels as their main goal, and all is ultimately subserviant to this. Exploration is necessary only to find new sources of treasure, or improved ways of wringing points from it. Socialising is a relaxing method of discovering what other players know about the business of accumulating points, that their knowledge can be applied to the task of gaining riches. Killing is only necessary to eliminate rivals or people who get in the way, or to gain vast amounts of points (if points are awarded for killing other players). In a business context, people who…