Player Types, Play Styles, and Play Complexity: Updating the Entertainment Grid

Richard Bartle’S Online Player Type Taxonomy

As a result of being co-creator of the world first Multi User Dungeon (MUD) as well as years of research on the subject of virtual worlds, Bartle (1996) created a set of two axes which he maintains reflect a wide spectrum of player motivations. In crossing these axes, four quadrants are created and a unique player type is associated with each quadrant. These crossed axes would provide what Bartle referred to as an interest graph whereupon a player would chart their preference on each axes independently and this would tell them with what type of player type they are most closely aligned. These player types have been the inspiration for many modern Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) as well as a questionnaire known as The Bartle Test (Andreasen, 1996). This test assesses an individual’s predilection towards any one or many of the player type and, to date, has over 700,000 responses in its database.