If you playtest your game with twelve different people, you’ll get twelve different opinions. This kind of qualitative feedback can be invaluable, but sometimes you need to step back from the tangled web of personal opinion and get a broader view of how your game will be interacting with a player community overall. To do this, most designers (and other professionals analyzing large communities) use a categorization system to break the community down into different categories based on their motivations.

Bartle’s Taxonomy is the categorization system of game players that gets taught the most in modern design circles. This system originated from discussion on an internet bulletin board in the early nineties between the top players of a popular MUD in the UK. MUDs (multi-user dungeons) are text-based, multiplayer environments where players can explore, go on adventures, and interact with each other. Think of them as the early ancestors of MMORPGs. Richard Bartle was the creator of MUD1, one of the very first MUDs in the world, and was an administrator for the MUD where these taxonomic discussions originated.

A screenshot from MUD1, the first “multi-user dungeon” created by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw in 1978.

As an admin for this MUD, Bartle took it upon himself to collect the findings of this discussion and publish them in an article. This article poses that a given player’s motivation for coming to the MUD can be charted onto a graph with two axes. The first axis shows how the player prefers to interface with the elements of the game - from interacting with the elements of the game back-and-forth, to acting upon those elements by imposing their will on the game. The second axis shows which elements of the game world the player prefers to engage with on a spectrum - from the other players of the game, to the game world which includes the rules, systems, and content of the game.

When charted on this graph, players can be placed into four different categories based on which quadrant of the graph they fall in. Bartle associated each of these with a playing card suit:

Killers enjoy imposing their will on the other players of the game. As the name suggests, in a lot of more combat-focused games, this manifests itself as killing other players in PvP combat. Killers enjoy demonstrating mastery over other players and testing their skills not against a system, but against other human beings.

Achievers strive to accomplish demonstrable goals and milestones in the game’s systems. They might socialize, explore, or kill, but it is all a means to the end of accomplishing whatever goal has been set out for them. Achievers gather points and resources, attempt to overcome the game’s greatest challenges, and strive to “beat” the game (or at least some aspect of it).

Socializers are interested in other people. The game is merely a set piece in which they can interact and share meaningful experiences with other human beings. Socializers prefer collaborative activities, coordinating with other players, trading and bartering, and systems that allow them to better form relationships with others.

Explorers seek to uncover and understand as much about the game as possible. This can manifest in the very literal exploration of the game’s space, but it also might be an exploration of the game’s systems and their inner workings. Explorers seek to find hidden secrets and build knowledge of the game and its systems and quirks.

Because these categories rose out of the multiplayer environment of a MUD, Bartle also took time analyzing how fluctuations in the number of a given player type in a community could affect the other player types. As a game’s community increases in the number of killers, for example, it can drive away socializers, who aren’t generally interested in the adversarial dynamic. Bartle charted this out in an ASCII diagram you can find in the original article. It’s a bit hard to parse. I have gone ahead and recreated a more simplified version here. The descriptions for what each arrow type means can be found below the diagram:

These interactions have been simplified from Bartle’s original article.

White arrow show a proportional relationship from one category to another. As it increases or decreases, so does the other.

Black arrows show an inversely-proportional relationship. As the source category increases, the other decreases and vice-versa.

*The grey arrow shows a slightly a-typical case in Bartle’s diagram. When achievers are at an equilibrium, it can increase the number of socializers. But radically increase or decrease the number of achievers, and the number of socializers will fall.

This diagram of interactions doesn’t get shared nearly as much as the chart of the four categories themselves. I think there are a couple reasons for this. First, this diagram can be a bit hard to parse. But second, as you might have done yourself while looking it over, it’s pretty easy to start poking holes in these various interactions. In this diagram, it becomes a lot more obvious that this taxonomy and the thought that went into it are primarily centered around one single type of game (MUDs), and their specific communities. There are a lot of well-established dynamics observed in modern player communities that aren’t really represented here. Even Bartle himself has warned against the application of this taxonomy to other game types, as he’s concerned it’s likely incomplete.

So, if this taxonomy is incomplete, why has it been so popular across game design circles? I definitely think it’s simplicity makes it easier to grok (heck, it’s why I chose it as the first categorization technique to cover on this blog). This simplicity also means that it’s a good foundation for other designers to build upon with the specifics of their game and their community. Categorization like this can be an invaluable tool for analyzing how changes to a game might impact a player community, and tons of people have built more in-depth and specific models that hopefully I can cover in future articles:

Researchers such as Dan Dixon have built on and responded to the foundation of Bartle and others to create a more in-depth discussion.
My favorite model of player motivation comes from the market research company Quantic Foundry. They map motivations across 12 factors in 6 categories. Their site also has a slick survey that you can take for your own personalized “Gamer Motivation Profile.”
Lots of designers have created their own taxonomies specific to their games. Most famously Mark Rosewater, the lead designer on Magic the Gathering, has created a number of psychographics that categorize the different players of Magic.

So, in the end, I don’t think I recommend using Bartle’s Taxonomy unaltered to analyze your own game. However, I do recommend reading into some of these more advanced categorizations and spending some time thinking about how they map to your game and its community (or potential community). Also, I would be curious to hear from all of you on what motivates you in games. Jump over to Quantic Foundry’s motivation profile survey and let me know here or on Twitter what kind of player you are!

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Bartle's Taxonomy

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