The Better Side of RPG Theory- Part III: Bartle’s Player Suits

In 1996 Richard A Bartle, one of the creators of the first MUD (or Mult-User Dungeon) approached the question of player styles*. MUDs of course aren’t traditional PNP role-playing games for a number of reasons, they are however certainly a type of role-playing game. Often by examining something close but different, new insights can be gained. In that line I decided to cover this model.

His basic player types would break down as follows:

Achievers: Those pursuing game related goals
Explorers: Those attempting to find out as much about the Virtual World as possible
Socializer: Those more interested in social interaction with their fellow players
Killers: Those interested in interacting with their fellow players, by killing them

Bartle would come back to these types in his 2003 book Designing Virtual Worlds where he’d consider just how they related (or didn’t) to table top roleplaying games comparing his model with the Threefold.

While Achiver matched nicely to Gamist and Explorer to Simulationist, he noted that there wasn’t a match for Socializer or Killer. This he felt was true because computers can easily multi-task to allow these types. Socializers could act in parallel with whatever else was going on in the world, and Killers could act independently (and secretly) of others. Meanwhile player groups are much more constrained to doing one thing at a time. In the reverse direction, any Story base player type found in table top would directly encounter the lack of ability to create Story variants (either by the system or by the players) and would quickly move on to something else.

IME, I know of exceptions- but they are more of the kind that proves the rule.

Allston’s player type Buddy is a type of Socializer, but is much more limited in scope for the reason Bartle notes- if one is socializing directly, the game isn’t being played. Thus the Buddy may be there for Social reasons, but he isn’t acting on them the same way he could in a MUD.

I’ve certainly seen Killers in table top rpgs, doing what Killers do- killing or otherwise causing problems for other players. This however is an atypical style and is commonly cause for ejection from a group. I’ve also seen accounts online of entire campaigns based around the concept of player conflict including killing each other's PCs. Lastly I see shades of this in Allston’s Mad Slasher. These however seem rare and/or unstable, and generally can’t exist outside a group where everyone buys into the concept.

One other interesting point of difference between MUDs and tabletop is that Bartle asserts that a MUD requires all four player types to be a MUD. Meanwhile Table Top groups typically attempt to remove undesired styles. Again this would seem due to the difference between a mult-tasking computer running for thousands, and the single task focus that a small group of humans bring to the gaming table.

One more interesting element about this model. Like the WotC study, Bartle defined not just the player types- but the axis upon which they related: Player-World, Acting-Interacting. This flushes out the model and allows one to analyze it to a degree not possible in the previous theories I’ve covered.

And for a fun point, there’s an online test to determine the takers own place in this Model. I’m 73% Explorer, 60% Achiver, 40% Socializer, 2% Killer… I would have thought I was more an Achiver, but I just wasn’t that big into bragging about myself.


*I should note that Richard Bartle considers this model out of date. He added a third axis called Implicit-Explicit. The result is a 3D instead of a 2D grid with 8 player types.