Finding ways to better understand your players
Metacore Games' Tim Shepherd explains how to better understand player motivations to create games that truly speak to your target audience
You know the games you love – but do you know why you love them? Can you explain why something is cool, but something else just doesn't do it for you?
Most people can't, and it is a tricky challenge even for game developers. While players can often identify elements they like – such as colors, puzzles, or characters – they rarely can elaborate why the elements appeal to them. As game developers, we need to understand not only what players like to play, but also the why behind it.
There are a range of methods to answer the two questions. The more traditional and obvious methods, like playtests, player surveys, market research, and in-game analytics, are useful for understanding what it is people enjoy to play. The second question – why does this audience enjoy whatever it is they do – is trickier! It requires gaining insights into the intrinsic motivations of individuals.
Luckily, this is not a new field of work. Maybe you've heard of terms like "Meyers-Briggs," "heuristics," or "personality tests." It's all about trying to understand what makes a person tick, whether it's in gaming, retail, the workplace, or relationships. In gaming specifically, terms like "player personas," "player archetypes," or "Bartle Player Types" might sound familiar.
But what does that actually mean, and how can you integrate it into your development? Here are three steps that game developers can follow to integrate player psychology into game development and create experiences that truly resonate with players. Let's dig in!
1. Find your audience before you find your game
At Metacore, players are the closest thing to a boss. To create a game that truly resonates with players, identifying an audience before diving into detailed game design is crucial. We approach this in two ways when developing new game concepts:
Idea first: We start with an idea for a game mechanic, world, or genre, then identify which players would enjoy this concept.
Audience first: Alternatively, we may want to create a new game for a specific audience, rather than find an audience for an idea. Understanding our audience helps us to start tailoring the game to their preferences.
Both approaches are valid and should be your initial step. Avoid fleshing out all the details too early. Instead, focus on discovering the potential audience or the gameplay they are likely to enjoy using powerful market research tools like Game Refinery. This platform analyzes millions of mobile gaming data points to form clusters of player behaviors, categorized into 12 motivations and eight player archetypes.
If we'd have an idea for a new merge game, we can examine the player motivation breakdowns for popular merge games using Game Refinery.
For example, in our game Merge Mansion, Game Refinery shows player motivations to include completing milestones, solving puzzles, and escapism, with less interest in strategy or competition. Knowing this, we could design our game to emphasize a progressive rewards system (Completing Milestones motivation) instead of a competitive PvP mode (Competition motivation).
A common pitfall for designers is investing time in building features they believe are fun without checking if the audience agrees! Tools like Game Refinery help identify where players find the fun, ensuring every part of your game pitch aligns with audience preferences. Make sure your game design decisions are driven by what the audience loves, not just what seems fun to build (but hopefully it's both!).
2. Reveal your audience's motivations with player research data
Once you have a live game, you now have access to real players and no longer need to rely solely on competitors' market data to refine your game. Real player data becomes your most valuable resource for actionable insights.
Through data analysis, you can pinpoint which parts of the game resonate most with players. Equally important, you can identify areas that are less enjoyable and investigate the reasons behind this. These insights are invaluable for guiding game development, highlighting what to enhance and what to re-evaluate.
Clustering player behaviors based on likes and dislikes will generate archetypes or player personas specific to your audience. Player interviews based on this behavioral segmentation will reveal patterns in each groups' motivations. This is where we begin to shine a light on the why in addition to the what.
You can create your own player persona models, or use third-party frameworks. Magic: The Gathering exemplifies the first approach with their "Timmys, Johnnys, and Spikes" model, which clusters player behaviors based on three personas, each with their own motivations.
'Spikes' are motivated to win by any means necessary. They don't mind bending the rules, and will use any tactic to secure a victory.
'Johnnys' are creative and innovative players who enjoy using rare cards in unique ways. They like to uncover game lore and complete collections. Johnnys are "happiest when exploring uncharted territories".
Finally, 'Timmys' also want to win big and smash their opponents, which sounds like a Spike, doesn't it? Until we discover Timmys' motivation: Timmy is more motivated by participation, and winning with style, than just winning at all. Sure, Timmys enjoy winning, but it is the social aspects and mastery which bring them back to Magic.
MTG ensures that any new features or cards cater to at least one of these player types. If it doesn't, it's reconsidered.
3. Leverage player insights beyond game development
Proprietary models are great because they only consider players who are actually actively playing your game. However, they don't consider players who don't play your game, nor do they help understand who the players are as people outside the game.
If you want to expand your audiences, or deepen the connection to an existing one, you might consider using newer data-driven platforms, such as Solsten. Solsten uses cognitive science and AI to create detailed psychological profiles, leveraging models like The Big Five (OCEAN) to analyze player behavior and preferences. In addition, they can uncover who players are as humans, outside of the fixed game environment.
We've been using Solsten's "Traits" platform to gain insights into our players' motivations in gaming, and also in life. For instance, understanding that our players value "Mastery" and "Completing Milestones" has informed our design and marketing strategies. Solsten helps us understand how these motivations translate into the real world, such as the affinity our players are likely to have with other game mechanics (useful when we are thinking of new features), other media preferences (applicable for character and world-building), and marketing messaging (great for creating eye-catching new ad creative and copy).
Often people are motivated by similar things in games as they are in life, but this statement can be met with some skepticism! I find it helpful to have someone familiar with behavioral psychology available when exploring these approaches.
Players – and developers – are humans
Understanding what drives players, both the who and the why, is an essential north star when driving your game development.
Application of psychographic frameworks to game development isn't particularly new – we have come a long way since Bartle's Player Types. We can now leverage academic and scientific methodologies alongside game data and AI to learn more about our players than ever before. What drives your audience as people, should be driving your game development.
Integrating player insights, motivations and psychographic frameworks allows you to design games that resonate with players' motivations, ensuring greater engagement and retention. Asking the right questions, understanding player psychology, and utilizing relevant frameworks can help create games where every player persona finds something that speaks to them, keeping them captivated and entertained for years to come.
Finally, if you're new to the world of player personas and psychographics, I highly encourage you to take a few personality and game motivation quizzes yourself, too. See if you can find patterns between what motivates you as a player, and what motivates you as a person – you might be surprised!
If you want to dig deeper on the topic, see below links for great talks, projects, tests, and platforms to learn more!
Resources
Videos:
- How Your Personality Affects What You Play, Daryl Talks Games
- 5 Domains of Play, 2012, 2018, Jason VandenBerghe
Models & reports:
- Bartle Player Types
- Who Plays Mobile Games (Google)
- GameRefinery Archetypes
- Solsten
- Big 5 / OCEAN (Wikipedia)
- 9 Quantric Gamer Types
- Magic the Gathering: Timmys, Jimmys, and Spikes (Fandom)
Books:
- Robert Cialdini, "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion"
- Daniel Kahneman, "Thinking, Fast and Slow"
- Dan Ariely, "Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape our Decisions"