Bartle’s theory of player types from the perspective of a Community Manager
See Bartle’s theory of player types from the perspective of a Community Manager; how we explored our community from Bartle’s POV, identified player categories and developed a communication strategy for each of them — plus, understand how this can help with monetization efforts!
Hello everyone, my name is Snezhana Frantsuzova, and I’m a Community Manager at MY.GAMES. It’s important for a Community Manager to learn how to feel the mood of an audience and understand its goals — Richard Bartle’s theory on player types helped me accomplish this.
In this post, I’ll discuss the aforementioned Bartle’s taxonomy of player types — but not from the point of view of game design, which everyone is already accustomed to, but from the perspective of community management. Using this classification system, you can quickly recognize the motivation of each individual player, then guide them in the right direction: in some cases to help the project, in others to build social connections.
Further, each player type comes with its own monetization features, and this is something to consider if you’re trying to find a balance between making a profit and building a healthy community. The MY.GAMES portfolio includes a wide variety of games and we carefully listen to the opinions of our players, providing all the necessary conditions for a comfortable gaming experience.
A little about Bartle’s theory
The project we work with is a casual puzzle game Storyngton Hall, which boasts a player count approaching 7 million. We focus on a very specific target audience: women 35+ living in the USA and Europe (and we also include Canada, Japan, and Australia).
To understand how Bartle’s model can be useful to us, let’s look at it in more detail:
The model consists of two intersecting segments. The horizontal axis represents the players and the world, while the vertical axis measures acting and interacting. Bartle believed that all players are divided into four categories: killers, achievers, socializers, explorers.
The killers
Let’s start with the most interesting ones: the killers. These players love power and dominance; they play to compete with other players and they love mini-events. Why? Because they have the opportunity to win there quite quickly, and there is no greater joy for them than to take the top positions in public rankings — this is a real pleasure for them. (And killers are the best for monetization efforts).
However, this is where the first problem arises: if killers are fairly aggressive players, then why should we invite them into the community? After all, with this behavior, they could wreak havoc on your player communication strategy.
The answer all really depends on the project. For example, the aptly-named Storyngton Hall is centered around its story. Our users read what amounts to a historical novel, follow the actions of the main characters, but they don’t themselves influence their behavior. Upon completing levels, they receive stars, which they can spend repairing the estate, buying clothes, and all sorts of other nice little things. Now, imagine that within this paradise, a killer player type has suddenly appeared and begins to inject a sense of competition while also spoiling the mood for everyone else.
(The Storyngton Hall community doesn’t react at all to these provocations; instead, the players wait for me to come and calm down a user who is trying to provoke an internal civil war.)
There is also a second problem: if a community is so peaceful, then what can be done on social networks? How can we organize contests and competitions if no one wants to compete or fight with each other? This largely depends on the current state of the project and the community.
For example, the Homescapes social media community reaches hundreds of thousands of members, and because of this, it’s difficult for organizers to sum up the results of competitions and distribute prizes. But things are different at Storyngton Hall; we don’t have that many followers on social networks: each post and competition has an average number of 50–70 comments. So it’s no big deal for me to simply read them all and give away prizes. In this sense, I have a kind of “kindergarten” policy on social networks: we’re all good, we’re all winners, and everyone does great to one degree or another.
This policy has allowed me to create a peaceful core audience that actively helps the players. When a newcomer comes into the community, if they need some kind of help, and if I’m not around, then the veterans immediately jump into action, explain everything to them, for instance, advising them which “golden card” is better to buy.
The achievers
The next category of players that Bartle spoke about are achievers; these are people who, naturally, play to succeed, and in the course of their gameplay, they try to obtain everything they can. Notably, this is the second highest group we identify in terms of monetization success.
These players also love mini-events because they can get prizes and gifts. And while they may love to brag, they don’t really pay attention to the ratings that we post after each competition on social networks.
The socializers
Another category Bartle identified are the socializers. These players are a real treasure for a community manager, as these people are engaged in building horizontal connections between all players and community members. On the flip side, the bad news is that this group is poorly monetized.
Why do I always talk about money? There is this view that a community manager has no influence on game monetization, but I strongly disagree. We’re engaged in cultivating loyalty through social networks and loyalty can also be monetized. If players aren’t loyal, then they’re unlikely to spend serious money on the game.
So, we strive to make sure that they are always in a good mood. And socializers help us with the above efforts as they build their circles of influence
The explorers
The last group are the explorers. These people play to discover new locations and gameplay opportunities. At the same time, they’re also on the lookout for bugs meaning that this category of players is best suited for the role of alpha testers. Every month I run a competition to identify explorers in my community.
The makeup of the ideal community
Bartle believed that the ideal community model that brings in the most money is as follows:
In addition to this ideal proportion, Bartle also identified four scenarios related to the balance of different player groups.
The first scenario is a balance of all types. In my opinion, achieving this is impossible because it presupposes some kind of “world peace.” Even if it were possible, practically speaking, maintaining this type of balance can require all the team’s energy.
The second scenario is a balance between killers and achievers. Both of these groups are well monetized and we end up with a war between the smartest and the richest. This is an excellent scenario in terms of monetization, but it’s unlikely to help create a healthy community because there will simply be no peace.
The third scenario is a predominance of socializers. This is a great scenario for a community manager because the community will be interested in building strong connections within itself — the bad news is that you won’t make much money.
The fourth scenario is the dominance of explorers. This option is good when the game is just entering the market and the team needs a lot of feedback and testers. In this situation, you can create a small community of researchers who will bring you feedback and this will allow you to prepare to enter a different scale and focus on a more serious target audience.
The Bartle model extended
Now it’s time to move on to Richard Bartle’s extended model: the plane of “conscious and unconscious behavior” has been added to the basic model. We now have not four types of players, but eight.
The “conscious/unconscious” plane is related to the player’s experience. When a person first comes to the game, they look around, they aren’t yet ready to spend money and take any meaningful actions. As they acquire new knowledge about the game, they become a “student”, and their actions begin to be meaningful and they have some goals and objectives. The next level is “experienced”: the player can develop their own strategy of behavior. After they have played enough, they become “old-timers” and simply enjoy communication.
The player’s development is always in motion, and they’re constantly evolving and changing. It’s the community manager’s responsibility to monitor the community and understand how its people and their moods are changing.
Additionally, another community manager task is bringing a person from unconscious behavior to conscious behavior. To do this, you need to not just post videos or memes, but pay a lot of attention to player feedback, study them, go to their pages, and see what they do there.
In the extended model, killers are divided into two categories: Griefers strive to gain fame in any way, and even bad fame will do. Politicians are great manipulators; if you meet such a player in your community, you should seriously monitor them — after some time, you may find out that you’re no longer the community manager, but instead, it’s this person who can very subtly manipulate the sentiments in your community.
Achievers are divided into opportunists and planners. The former are most concerned about obstacles within the game; however, if they encounter a significant number of obstacles at the very beginning, they’ll simply drift away from your community. In such a situation, a community manager has to reassure them, and explain that support will sort everything out. Planners, on the contrary, are ready to achieve some of their own goals and can overcome difficulties with composure.
Two groups of socializers are friends and networkers. The first category is simply people who strive to communicate. On the other hand, networkers consciously set out to build horizontal connections between players. The former can become a reliable support and act as additional assistants who can actually take over the functions of the community manager.
This happens at Storyngton Hall; I have several networkers who organized their own communities: “Storyngton Hall Family”, “Storyngton Hall History”, and so on. They take the content I post on social media and move it into their own communities. By doing so, they both support the brand and promote the game, and I keep track of what they’re doing. These are my “agents of influence” in other target audiences that I will most likely never be able to reach.
Moving on, researchers are divided into hackers and scientists. Hackers can hurt you if they don’t like something, but scientists are the best alpha testers. They hate mass events, but love it when you work with them individually.
We had a case where a killer was among a group of researchers. She was a very good scientist — she found a lot of bugs. But after a while she got bored and started organizing “races” between the alpha testers. So, we had to say goodbye!
Player evolution
The most interesting thing about this system is that players can evolve and move from category to category. For example, with proper treatment, a dissatisfied novice griefer can be converted into a scientist — you just need to note their merits and skills.
From there, this player will inevitably evolve — they’ll have their own strategy of behavior and will move into the state of a planner. Gradually they’ll calm down, get used to everything and move into the category of old-timers/friends. As a result, they can actually help and protect the community.
There are different evolutionary paths for players, and over time, they can become both assistants to the community manager — or pests. For example, politicians can actually cause a revolution in your community; people will argue and treat each other badly, and it will be very difficult for you to fix all this. Hackers will tell you how to exploit loopholes in the game and promote cheating.
When I started working as a community manager, I had a small community that was evolving. Once there were a lot of people, I began to think that we need to somehow influence this development process. From there, I began to explore my community from Bartle’s point of view and identified different categories of players. After this, I divided the audience into subcommunities and determined a communication strategy for each of them. As a result, I began to work out my content plan, taking into account the needs of these categories of players. Different types of tasks, competitions and methods of information have appeared.
After researching the audience, I realized that our players love fairly complex but creative competitions. At some point, I suggested that they write an alternative continuation of the novel. To my surprise, there was a lot of feedback, and they sent us quite a number of submissions. And for me, this feedback was evidence that I was moving in the right direction. (So, I now place great emphasis on creative competitions: those where participants must create, write, draw, or photograph something.)
It’s important to remember that the Bartle model of community management is not a universal solution that works in all cases. Much depends on the specifics of the individual audience — you must also add the cultural context and values of the players with whom you interact.
When you select the right tools to work with your audience and different categories, a new iterative process will begin — you’ll test these tools, implement them in your work, and after some time, start the whole process all over again. Gaming communities are forever changing, so we need to constantly monitor its needs and adapt your strategy accordingly.
