A Playstyle Framework for Game Designers

5 min readOct 22, 2022

One of the most important things as a designer is to understand your audience, in our case, players.

There are lots of great tools to understand players’ motivation, such as self-motivation theories or play types. There are also lots of ways to understand how players will behave with one another, such as personas or dynamics journey maps. But we don’t have frameworks to know how they will play with our games.

It matters because we all play differently according to our personalities and preferences. For example, two sword fighters will not use the same skills, maybe one will rely on his speed and strength while the other one on his analytical skills.

But if we are all different, how can we make a framework that can fit most cases (or maybe all ?)

First, we have to reduce games to their simplest things.

Games are sequences of goals that create situations that can be resolved through skills or luck, all ruled and constrained by systems.
Each beat of those sequences results in challenges, which reward you as output, intrinsically or extrinsically.

Playtypes are goals, systems & situations. Playstyles are all the paths a player can take to attain a unique outcome.

Now we know that playstyles are paths we choose to attain a goal. What’s funny is there is already a theory about it!

Regulatory focus theory (RFT) is a theory of goal pursuit formulated by Columbia University psychology professor and researcher E. Tory Higgins regarding people’s perceptions in the decision making process. RFT examines the relationship between the motivation of a person and the way in which they go about achieving their goal. RFT posits two separate and independent self-regulatory orientations: prevention and promotion (Higgins, 1997).

This theory basically says that there are two orientations :

Promotion-focus tend to see what they can win (Play to win)
Prevention-focus tend to see what they can lose (Play not to lose)

We aren’t bound to one! But we may often show a strong preference.

Promotion focus is related to eagerness, quick thinking & idea generation. Whereas Prevention focuses are related to vigilance, methodical thinking & problem-solving.

This may sound a lot “cliché”, but it helps a lot to identify a focus.
Let me take an example to show you its application:

A friend and I are both playing Zelda Breath of the Wild. We decided to advance at the same time. Each day we played for some time and then gave the other a summary of our advancement.

We both arrived at the same quest, which required us to get electric arrows at a specific location.

Because my friend has a promotion focus playstyle, he immediately thought that the enemy had electric arrows (which is true). He decided to fight one versus one to kill him. Because I have a more prevention focus playstyle, I was more vigilant and methodical, and I found out that electric arrows were dispersed around the place. I retrieved all arrows like a ninja without fighting.

Both solutions were valid, and I think there were even more possible solutions! They all lead to unique challenges.

How can we get all possible solutions (or most of them)? It would require us to analyze lots of factors… or maybe not?

To gain greater accuracy we can add four preferences.

Skill preference

Because you have a prevention focus style doesn’t mean you like to use your brain like I am. I’ve seen a prevented-focus player use a bow!
We can divide skill preference into three just like in rational game design.

Physical (timing, precision,..etc)
Mental (strategy, observation,..etc)
Social is the application of both but in multiplayer (Synchronisation, communication,…etc)

A player can like to use the three of them at the same time!

Player x Other intelligence

We tend to react in two ways (or both) with other intelligence such as AI or Players.

Competition: Prefer to play against other intelligences
Collaboration: Prefer to play with other intelligences
Comp-Collab: Prefer to play with other intelligences, against other intelligences
None: Alone

Player x Environment

We tend to have a preference for how we interact with the environment.

Interaction: Interact with existing elements of the environment.
Manipulation: Manipulate existing elements of the environment by adding new (for example character unique abilities)
Intera-Manip: Manipulate existing elements of the environment by adding new unique abilities to make existing elements interact.
None

Progression view

We don’t always see progression extrinsically or as in-game rewards. Sometimes learning is a reward.

Now that we have more accuracy, let’s assemble the full framework.

Applying Framework

Let’s take back Zelda Breath of the Wild example!

You see — same focus as me, but a different way to resolve the situation.

Let’s take a last example!

A player is playing Jedi Fallen Order, he is in front of two enemies, although they didn’t see him yet.

The Framework

How can you use it?

To create presets of playstyles (let emergence do the rest)
To understand how players can resolve a situation (multi-minded approach)
To identify the core or dominant playstyle

Go further

Use both this framework and play types/self-motivation theories
Use it to study player behaviors and playstyles in multiplayer situations
Use it to create more gameplay depth (more playstyles) or more gameplay width (more challenges for the same playstyle)