Notes on Prototypes and Personas

Player-centric design thinking starts by establishing the context of play and defining a game’s ‘primary players’. This process usually considers these primary players to exist as a sort of Aristotelian category. I want to quickly propose a different conceptual framing that starts by borrowing some ideas from cognitive science.

Inspired by prototype theory, I’ve taken to viewing our players as a graded multi-dimensional categorization where some members are more central than others, but in which all players have some degree of membership. You could say that there is one prototypical Player and every player exhibits some degree of Playerness.

Player’s various attributes individuate the dimensions of our category. Two of those dimensions might represent, for example, age and income level. When it comes to determining the Playerness of any given player, these dimensions are weighted (age might contribute more strongly to Playerness than income level) and the functions that define those weights are dependent (the weight of age might vary by income level).

Our “primary players” for the purposes of design thinking, can be viewed as a defuzification of the category that includes any players that exhibit a high degree of Playerness.

Just like in prototype theory, it is possible to have single categories with multiple disconnected prototypes and to therefore have several Players and different types of Playerness. That said, I don’t view anything intrinsically wrong with a game having just one Player because that Player will manifest in multiple personas based on unique play-patterns.

This notion of a persona is based on the metaphorical sense employed by Alessandro Canossa and Anders Drachen in their paper “Play-Personas: Behaviours and Belief Systems in User-Centred Game Design”. Their use, as a metaphor, is conceptualized as follows:

Play-personas as design tools represent an expectance of how players would like to craft their experience. As metaphors, play-personas are hypotheses that emerge as relations of parameters from the set of possibilities that the game can afford.

The possibilities in question relate directly to a possibility space as defined by the spaces, rules and mechanics of the game.

My conception of a persona differs from a play-persona in that it is grounded in the phenomenological assumptions that the mechanical aspects of gameplay are a form of performative narrative, and that all game narrative can be viewed as a collaboratively authored sub-narrative that is properly contextualized within the player’s broader identity narrative. This effectively extends the possibility space to encompass the interaction between Player’s constructed identity narrative and the developer’s preconceived narrative intent.

Before concluding, it is probably important to note that while Player is fictional and constructed, they are not simply invented. The same sort of demographic and psychographic research that would traditionally go into defining ‘primary players’ should go into understanding who a prototypical Player is. Likewise, the parameters from which personas are defined are not arbitrarily selected — they instead represent the defining characteristics of a fully-contextualized gameplay experience.