Do you think that the model would be a good tool for discovering new target audiences that have not yet been tapped? I don’t think you described this discovery process as being “What it’s good for”, but I see that as the strongest and most obvious application. In fact, we could probably make a multidimensional heat-map of common game types and uncommon game types…

Thoughts?

I liked the dragon story, but I got to the point where I could incinerate pretty much anybody except a bandit (because they level up, yo). And the missions were rather too similar.

Can you actually diss a game you’ve played 100 hours of?

It sounds like taking a chance on Skyrim paid off pretty well for you, but when you tell this story to other people, do you suggest they follow your lead, or should we just appreciate the tale for what it is?

The same goes for classification of human needs, human emotions, etc. These are all very subjective and hardly scientific but they are a great tool for, say, simulations. Starting from any classification of human emotions and building fuzzy logic around the subject (basing it on ones “expertise” with world) yields great results. Probably not accurate in terms of modeling reality but simulations using these kind of data lead to some interesting results.

As for the personal stories – at one point in life I went to the therapist (psychodynamic psychotherapy kind of a deal) and I can attest that my world view has changed significantly. I can see lots of dynamics that were impossible for me to pierce before. Great experience that I highly recommend. Especially since I can see how most of the people around me are struggling, not knowing about their problems. I do struggle but at least I see more. ;]

Back in game design school, the instructors were way into Meyers-Briggs. They’d spend several lectures each semester telling us that nothing is more important than knowing your four letters, so we had a campus full of people who could smugly report that they were INTJs, or whatever, but like you said, it never amounted to anything more than attempting to manipulate each other in meetings or sound important around students from other majors who didn’t know what these little initialisms meant. The game design applications of psychology were roundly ignored.

I quickly developed a distaste for mindless regurgitation of Meyers-Briggs test results, as well as the oversimplified player-types (Achievers, Explorers, blah, blah, blah). I think that’s what interests me about your model – not only do you seem exceedingly knowledgeable on the subject, you’ve also considered the practical use of this theory.

I look forward to reading more. Maybe one day your writing will be misunderstood and abused by mediocre colleges!

And yeah, you’ll miss a thing here and there. That’s why you have comments section, don’t you?

There are exceptions – and they are the ones that have just been absorbed into design practice without any fuss (Bartle, Lazarro, LeBlanc, etc).

I don’t know if what I’m doing will end up being a waste of time for other people or not. I do know that it has profoundly changed the way *I* design, and I feel like I’m just scratching the surface so far.

But yes – transplanting won’t work. That’s why I’m trying a different approach: translation. I’m taking the principles that lie underneath the Big 5 system (and their approach to study and discovery) and am searching for the application of those principles in our day-to-day design work.