Posted by: schild @ 01:28:38 on 3/2/08
At the beginning of October, 2005, f13 published an article by Dave Rickey [who also has a new blog!] - as the banner above says - about player types in MMOGs and the way players play these games. In my opinion, despite the badgers in the forums (and mushrooms and snakes), it's a good time to revisit it simply because the genre has taken exactly zero steps forward since then. But that's not what I want you to discuss since I'm mostly crazy, rather, the article, reproduced in its entirety, sans images (error: could not find them). Read on for the meat.
All text below the following line is from the original article.
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There are a lot of implications, some of them pretty fundamental, from the framework I described a couple of days ago. But the most striking for me is the combination of the reward-oriented behaviouristic analysis with a goal structure that is not strictly one of players consuming content that we generate.
Let's make a simple assumption: Players spend their time pursuing goals of their choice based on reasons they feel are sufficient. If they are currently pursuing goals that are less attractive to them, it's because they are on their way to a larger goal that is attractive enough to make it worth it (as when a PvP oriented player "grinds" a character to maximum level in order to be competitive), or habituation has made the earlier goals less attractive. Let's assume that given these extrinsic motivations, they are rational and fairly accurate in assessing their tradeoffs. In other words, the players are, as a whole, getting it right, and if they are engaging in widespread behaviours we don't understand it's because we have ailed to understand why they play.
At the core of the process is an "acceptance of verisimilitude". The world that is presented to the players is accepted on its own terms as being a "real" one, and the player has accepted the viewpoint as being their own. This is much more than the "suspension of disbelief" that lies at the center of more traditional entertainments. In a novel, movie, or TV show, you may identify with one or more of the characters, but you normally will not think of yourself as being that character, experiencing the events directly. But in an online game, "you" are the one who is pictured on-screen, "you" are the one who engages in combat or other activities, "you" are the one who "dies". Even the aociopathic behaviour associated with anonymity and "keyboard lycanthropy" draws it's attraction from what the system allows "you" to do to "them".
And in these worlds, things behave with at least a thin veneer of realism, and if they don't, you notice. Not absolute realism, but more of an "intuitive physics". Unsupported objects tend to fall down, as you shift your viewpoint you see different sides of them. If the player cannot make this transition of viewpoint, either because of the presentation (text vs. graphical vs. 3D), or because of avatar selection (attractive vs. unattractive, humanoid vs. vehicular), then they won't stay.
Having accepted the world as "real enough" and the avatar as themselves, the players interact with it according to its rules, and treat the other players as real. This is where our players come from, but why is that they play in the ways that they do?
In his seminal paper, "Players Who Suit MUDs", Richard Bartle proposes four player types:
The point here is that we have two dichotomies which divide players into four groups. These groups are not completely mutually exclusive, but there is an implied exclusion between groups in opposition on the graph. Socializers hate killing things, achievers hate chatting, explorers can't be bothered to kill other players, and killers apparently aren't aware enough of the world they occupy to try and understand it.
Now, I should note that this is not how Dr. Bartle puts it himself, rather those who cite his paper in ordinary discussion frequently make these assumptions themselves. In the paper itself:
The fundamental problems here are fourfold:
These objections are nothing new, they have been raised repeatedly for years. What has been lacking was a better framework to offer in it's stead. The key was to stop focusing on means, and look only at motivations. Why do players play, why do they select the goals which they do? The answer to means then becomes straightforward: Whatever is available to pursue their goals without frustrating their accomplishment for too long.
So, for motivations, where do we turn? Nick Yee has done a survey called the Facets study in which he looked for exactly that: Player's motivations to play:
Now, the advantages of the Facets approach over the HCDS system:
However, the Facets framework has certain weak points as well:
However, it is as I stated, an inherently more flexible framework than HCDS, and building on it I would a different model of player motivations and their relationship to game design:
Mastery
Achievment
Immersion
Socialisation
Exploration
MAISE (pronounced as "maze") ties in with my earlier discussion of game analysis oriented on the accumulation of power, but coming from the other end (motives rather than goals).
When players are motivated by Mastery, they want to be important, to have authority within the game. This authority may be through membership in a group that holds power, or through game systems that allow them to exert lasting impacts, but the key aspect of it is that they seek power that extends beyond their avatar. Guild membership is the route to this desire in most games, and these players will be drawn towards the guilds that can effectively pursue these goals. Contested assets (raid access, whole-population effectiveness boosters, valued but controllable in-game resources of any kind) tend to become the focus of their machinations. They will play whatever character is needed to exercise power, and follow whatever tactical instructions neccessary, even if they are simplistic and sacrificial. The more the game allows the players to exert control over the world, the more opportunities for mastery will exist.
When players are driven by Achievement they are focused on the power of their characters, as measured by the game systems (especially combat). They are trying to increase the capabilities of their characters, usually through the accumulation of skills, levels, powers, or whatever other forms of utility they can attach to their characters. They dislike feeling like they have wasted effort advancing a character that will always be weaker than another that took different choices. The larger the number of steps and gateways (opening up of more advancement possibilities), the more opportunity there is for achievement.
Players that want to Immerse themselves in the game are looking for a fantasy in which they can be the center of a story-like experience. They'll take the virtual world at face value, treating the game as if it were a portal into an alternate universe. They may write about these experiences "in-character", as well as spend at least some of their time in the game pretending to be someone they are not (this includes secret gender-benders). They'll tend to seek out quests, in-game lore, visually impressive places, and rare items of unique appearance. They may sacrifice utility for style, using inferior equipment or making non-optimum character development choices because it more closely corresponds with their desired self-image. The more detailed and compelling the world, the more there are opportunities for immersion.
When players are drawn to Socialize within the game, they will treat it much like any other social setting. They will seek out other players with whom to form relationships (casual or intimate), and talk with them about subjects that extend well beyond the in-game context (politics, sports, the likely contents of the next game patch, who was cybering with the guildmaster's girlfriend, and if "she" is really played by a man). This socialization will often extend beyond the game boundaries to message boards, IM's, real-life gatherings, and other opportunities for social grooming, especially when the player is not able to play the game at that particular moment. To maintain and improve social standing, players will often give in-game currency and items, spend time helping others advance their characters or acquire items, and play classes that are in high demand for groups even though they may be less directly powerful. The more that the game makes players dependent on each other, the greater the opportunities for socialization. If the gameplay does not provide pauses and allow multi-tasking with social activities, the socialization opportunities will be greatly curtailed.
Exploration is about the pursuit of knowledge. Players can spend time learning about the world they are embedded in simply in order to know more about it, or with the hope of being able to use this knowledge to pursue goals (including the acquisition of more knowledge). This may involve completely mapping the game world, reverse-engineering the mathematical formula behind game systems, minimaxing the possibility space of character development, or inventorying the non-terrain content of the world (including quests, purchasable items, crafting systems, etc.). They may play any character that opens up opportunity for exploration, but often get bored when they have exhausted the opportunities for a particular character (or game system) and move on to something else. The more "breadth" (emergent complexity) a game system contains, the greater the opportunities for exploration.
The main thing to remember is that motivations are not mutually exclusive. A random player will usually have multiple motivations, to varying degrees. Which he pursues at any given time will depend on the overall balance of motivations and the opportunities for satisfying them that are available to him.
There's a lot of behaviouristic psychology involved in MMO design, and they've often been referred to as "virtual skinner boxes". In general, you'll get a lot further assuming the players are goal-seeking agents like experimental animals in a maze, seeking out their reward and eventually working out the shortest possible path and using it exclusively. But most of our games are essentially only designed for Achievement oriented gameplay, with all other motivations being only accidentally served, and efforts to explicitly serve them have been done in the Achievement style with metrics grafted over the paths. Imagine the "possibility space" of a game as a sort of hyperdimensional maze. The player comes into the world with a desire to reach some end state, and the game offers him various pathways to that end state:
Pathways can be independant, interpendant, incomplete, merging, divergent, or isolated. A path pursuing one motivation may act as a shortcut for others (where a player may wish to Achieve, but Socialization offers access to the fruits of other's Exploration and Mastery, making their own achievement much faster). Or they may wish to strictly Socialize, which draws them into Achievement (in order to have common goals with others), which draws them into Mastery (in order to be able to do their part in supporting the team).
The obvious optimum path for one player may not be attractive to another player, because it requires too much time to be spent following motivations that are weak in them. For example, a player with an extremely high motivation to Explore may find grouping (Socializing) and pursuit of Mastery unacceptable, because those activities do not feel rewarding to him. Even if it would aid his exploration efforts, they might prefer to go it alone.
Frequently it has been assumed that if there was an optimum path to Achievement, all players would pursue that path exclusively and independently of any other. This may be true for some players, but it is not universal. Some players will simply have different motivations, and therefore will pursue different pathways. Even players who feel themselves to be exclusively oriented on one motivation may spend considerable time and effort acting as if they are responding to a different one (as the Achiever who thinks of Socialization as being strictly for roleplayers, but actually spends up to half his time in game chatting).
The question to ask here is: Does this framework help us make better games? It is probably not practical to try to actually plot out the possiblity space of a game in this way, but thinking of it in these terms would seem to offer opportunities for refinement of our "rules of thumb" into working bits of craft. If we think of "Twinking" as players taking a Socialization shortcut down the Achievement pathway, then we can think of it as a potentially desirable activity. If we think of "exploits" and "spoilers" on websites as Exploration shortcuts to Mastery or Achievement, then the role of these sites and their popularity become much clearer.
In the end, our twisty little passages may be "all alike". The ultimate goal the players seem to be seeking is status, and the motivations may simply be seen as strategies for pursuing it. If we evaluate each motivation as a strategy for gaining cognition and status, then a different picture emerges:
Status through the exercise of power, either as an individual or as part of a group. Your use of power may be benign (an equitable calendar system for access to high-level content), impositional (the forceful domination of an "Uber Guild" on raid ccess), or hostile (the disruptive behaviour of "griefers" and "PK's"). Other players look to you for assistance or protection.
Status through the maximization of tangible and direct game assets. This can include character abilities, levels, and equipment, as well as in-game housing. Wealth and coveted equipment are not just acquired, you display them and brag about how hard they were to get. Other players look to you for a standard of comparison.
Status through memorable and distinctive appearance and behaviour. Your insistence on treating the world as if it were real is combined with an effort to stand out in that environment, as a sort of performance artist. Other players look to you for entertainment.
Status from being a social hub, frequently the first to be informed and to inform others of events and news. You know and are known to many different people. Other players look to you for gossip.
Status from holding hidden knowledge. You will often encapsulate your acquired knowledge into strategy guides and other public out-of-game displays of wisdom. Other players look to you for tips and advice.
The players may not, often will not, have a clear and conscious awareness of their motivations, strategies, and goals. The actual actions they take may be entirely tangential to their stated goals and directly contrary to their claimed strategy. Human beings are endlessly capable of self-delusion and rationalization. Attempts to predict the response of players to game systems and goal/obstacle arrangements should focus on actual behaviour and not stated desires.
MAISE should not be taken as a final and authoritive inventory of motivations and strategies, but only as a potentially useful framework. It is entirely possible, even probable, that the motivational framework of the players could be defined in different terms, and those terms might be more useful for a particular purpose. For example, I have conflated all impositional interactions by the players on both the world and each other into Mastery, where others might choose to subdivide them into separate categories such as "Grief", "Leadership", "Group Identity", "Creative Impulse", and so on, or to combine parts of it with what I have defined as Achievement and Exploration.
In fact, the very act of doing so in the course of game design may make it true, at least for that game. In the high-level "Raid" environments of EQ and similar games, Mastery and Achievement are effectively inseparable, and even at lower levels Achievement and Socialization are effectively hand-in-hand pathways if grouping is effectively required by the game structure. More effective and coherent game design might simply be a matter of choosing a framework of motivations and defining your goal/obstacle systems to correspond with that framework.
However, sometimes you don't get to choose your framework: In early Ultima Online, the persistant attributes of the world, the open nature of PvP combat, and the higher rewards of PK activites compared to PvE effectively conflated Achievement with the "grief" aspects of hostile Mastery. In many games, an explicit effort has been made to offer many opportunities for variation in Achievement, but the players quickly realized that only a narrow and specific range of possibilities was dominant, as in Asheron's Call 1, where the millions of possible combinations of skill advancement were quickly reduced by the players to a handful of "Extreme" templates. Much of this may be the result of having a limited or inaccurate view of player motives (in this case, assuming players would be more interested in Immersion than Achievement).
Ultimately, the core of this framework is the presumption that the player's draw to and continued residence in these games is a response to fundamental desires not too different from those that drive behaviour in the real world, but in an artificial environment where many of the obscuring complexities of layered strategic interaction have been removed. Learning more about how to make virtual worlds will tell us more about how people act in the real one, and vice-versa.
[discuss]
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There are a lot of implications, some of them pretty fundamental, from the framework I described a couple of days ago. But the most striking for me is the combination of the reward-oriented behaviouristic analysis with a goal structure that is not strictly one of players consuming content that we generate.
Let's make a simple assumption: Players spend their time pursuing goals of their choice based on reasons they feel are sufficient. If they are currently pursuing goals that are less attractive to them, it's because they are on their way to a larger goal that is attractive enough to make it worth it (as when a PvP oriented player "grinds" a character to maximum level in order to be competitive), or habituation has made the earlier goals less attractive. Let's assume that given these extrinsic motivations, they are rational and fairly accurate in assessing their tradeoffs. In other words, the players are, as a whole, getting it right, and if they are engaging in widespread behaviours we don't understand it's because we have ailed to understand why they play.
At the core of the process is an "acceptance of verisimilitude". The world that is presented to the players is accepted on its own terms as being a "real" one, and the player has accepted the viewpoint as being their own. This is much more than the "suspension of disbelief" that lies at the center of more traditional entertainments. In a novel, movie, or TV show, you may identify with one or more of the characters, but you normally will not think of yourself as being that character, experiencing the events directly. But in an online game, "you" are the one who is pictured on-screen, "you" are the one who engages in combat or other activities, "you" are the one who "dies". Even the aociopathic behaviour associated with anonymity and "keyboard lycanthropy" draws it's attraction from what the system allows "you" to do to "them".
And in these worlds, things behave with at least a thin veneer of realism, and if they don't, you notice. Not absolute realism, but more of an "intuitive physics". Unsupported objects tend to fall down, as you shift your viewpoint you see different sides of them. If the player cannot make this transition of viewpoint, either because of the presentation (text vs. graphical vs. 3D), or because of avatar selection (attractive vs. unattractive, humanoid vs. vehicular), then they won't stay.
Having accepted the world as "real enough" and the avatar as themselves, the players interact with it according to its rules, and treat the other players as real. This is where our players come from, but why is that they play in the ways that they do?
Bartle's Suits
In his seminal paper, "Players Who Suit MUDs", Richard Bartle proposes four player types:
Achievers are interested in doing things to the game, ie. in ACTING on the WORLD. The point of playing is to master the game, and make it do what you want it to do; there's nothing intrinsically worthwhile in rooting out irrelevant details that will never be of use, or in idling away your life with gossip. Achievers are proud of their formal status in the game's built-in level hierarchy, and of how short a time they took to reach it.
Explorers are interested in having the game surprise them, ie. in INTERACTING with the WORLD. Most accomplished explorers could easily rack up sufficient points to reach the top, but such one-dimensional behaviour is the sign of a limited intellect. Explorers are proud of their knowledge of the game's finer points, especially if new players treat them as founts of all knowledge.
Socialisers are interested in INTERACTING with other PLAYERS. The game world is just a setting; it's the characters that make it so compelling. Socialisers are proud of their friendships, their contacts and their influence.
Killers are interested in doing things to people, ie. in ACTING on other PLAYERS. Accumulated knowledge is useless unless it can be applied; even when it is applied, there's no fun unless it can affect a real person instead of an emotionless, computerised entity. Killers are proud of their reputation and of their oft-practiced fighting skills.
The point here is that we have two dichotomies which divide players into four groups. These groups are not completely mutually exclusive, but there is an implied exclusion between groups in opposition on the graph. Socializers hate killing things, achievers hate chatting, explorers can't be bothered to kill other players, and killers apparently aren't aware enough of the world they occupy to try and understand it.
Now, I should note that this is not how Dr. Bartle puts it himself, rather those who cite his paper in ordinary discussion frequently make these assumptions themselves. In the paper itself:
Naturally, these areas cross over, and players will often drift between all four, depending on their mood or current playing style. However, my experience having observed players in the light of this research suggests that many (if not most) players do have a primary style, and will only switch to other styles as a (deliberate or subconscious) means to advance their main interest.
The fundamental problems here are fourfold:
- The paired dichotomies create a closed system. Additional motivations can only be accomodated by adding more dichotomies (more dimensions to the graph). Many people (including myself and Dr. Bartle) have tried to do this, never with very satisfactory results. The basic problem is that additional dimensions can only subdivide existing types, and must do so to all types.
- The system inherently assumes that an individual player has only one primary approach to playing the game, and will engage in others only if absolutely neccessary. This simply doesn't correspond with how players actually behave, where they will shift strategies and goals from night to night, or even several times in the same playing session, even when the "primary" path is still open to them.
- The system states that making a game more attractive to one group makes it less attractive to others. Observation would certainly bear out that making a game more attractive to those who wish to "Impose their will on others" in hostile ways will drive away other players, but it is difficult to understand how adding more communication functions will cause non-socializers of any stripe to depart.
- The system equates motivations and means, assuming that those who spend most of their time chatting are in the game to chat. This leads to Warren Spector's charge of "Why not just make a better IRC client?" This conflation of motives and means seems uneccessary and confusing.
These objections are nothing new, they have been raised repeatedly for years. What has been lacking was a better framework to offer in it's stead. The key was to stop focusing on means, and look only at motivations. Why do players play, why do they select the goals which they do? The answer to means then becomes straightforward: Whatever is available to pursue their goals without frustrating their accomplishment for too long.
Yee's Facets
So, for motivations, where do we turn? Nick Yee has done a survey called the Facets study in which he looked for exactly that: Player's motivations to play:
Relationship: This factor measures the desire to develop meaningful relationships with other players in the game - usually in the form of a supportive friendship. These players also tend to feel that they have learned things about themselves from playing the game, as well as gaining a better understanding of real-life group dynamics.
Immersion: This factor measures the desire to become immersed in a make-believe construct. They also appreciate the sense of being part of an ongoing story, and oftentimes will think up a personal history and story for their characters.
Grief: This factor measures the desire to objectify and use other players for one's own gains. The satisfaction comes from some form of manipulation of other players for personal gain.
Achievement: This factor measures the desire to become powerful within the construct of a game. Players who score high on this factor try to reach the goals as defined by the game. They try very hard to accumulate rewards. But the satisfaction comes from feeling powerful.
Leadership: This factor measures the gregariousness and assertiveness of the player. Players who score high on this factor prefer to group rather than solo.
Now, the advantages of the Facets approach over the HCDS system:
- The Facets approach is rooted in a long history of psychological profiling and testing
- It is an open framework, which allows addition, subtraction, and subdivision of motivations without drastic overhaul or dilution.
- It does not, even by implication, divide the players into mutually exclusive types. Players can easily be seen as having multiple motivations, to varying degrees, and their behaviour understood in those terms in a more straightforward fashion.
- It cleanly separates distinct types of playing behaviour either conflated or ignored in HCDS. For example, "roleplayers" are grouped with "socializers" in the HCDS framework, in Facets they are clearly pursuing the "Immersion" motivation. Also, "leadership" motivated players are grouped with "griefers" into the "Killers" category, because both pursued goals centering on imposing their will on other players.
- This motivations-oriented approach gives a better viewpoint within which to try to craft the game experience of players through goals and obstacles, allowing us to see what goals and what obstacles will be coherent in player's eyes, and when and how players will "jump the tracks" and pursue their long-range goals by less-desired means.
However, the Facets framework has certain weak points as well:
- It was developed within the conceptual framework of anthropological/sociological study, which focuses on observation rather than explanation. It will tell us about the players, but it won't tell us about the game systems they prefer to interact with and through. So although it may tell us why people play, it tells us comparatively little about how they play.
- It can include motivations which are not useful in a design sense, for example the "Grief" factor is something we design against satisfying, not something we design for, while the "Relationship" factor is primarily satisfied through other players without input from the game systems.
- It failed to detect a motivation that is at least the stated prime mover for most online game designers, as well as many players: The urge to explore strictly for the sake of exploration, to know things about the world and its systems unknown to others (possibly even including the developers).
However, it is as I stated, an inherently more flexible framework than HCDS, and building on it I would a different model of player motivations and their relationship to game design:
Motivations In MMOG's
Mastery
Achievment
Immersion
Socialisation
Exploration
MAISE (pronounced as "maze") ties in with my earlier discussion of game analysis oriented on the accumulation of power, but coming from the other end (motives rather than goals).
Mastery
When players are motivated by Mastery, they want to be important, to have authority within the game. This authority may be through membership in a group that holds power, or through game systems that allow them to exert lasting impacts, but the key aspect of it is that they seek power that extends beyond their avatar. Guild membership is the route to this desire in most games, and these players will be drawn towards the guilds that can effectively pursue these goals. Contested assets (raid access, whole-population effectiveness boosters, valued but controllable in-game resources of any kind) tend to become the focus of their machinations. They will play whatever character is needed to exercise power, and follow whatever tactical instructions neccessary, even if they are simplistic and sacrificial. The more the game allows the players to exert control over the world, the more opportunities for mastery will exist.
Achievement
When players are driven by Achievement they are focused on the power of their characters, as measured by the game systems (especially combat). They are trying to increase the capabilities of their characters, usually through the accumulation of skills, levels, powers, or whatever other forms of utility they can attach to their characters. They dislike feeling like they have wasted effort advancing a character that will always be weaker than another that took different choices. The larger the number of steps and gateways (opening up of more advancement possibilities), the more opportunity there is for achievement.
Immersion
Players that want to Immerse themselves in the game are looking for a fantasy in which they can be the center of a story-like experience. They'll take the virtual world at face value, treating the game as if it were a portal into an alternate universe. They may write about these experiences "in-character", as well as spend at least some of their time in the game pretending to be someone they are not (this includes secret gender-benders). They'll tend to seek out quests, in-game lore, visually impressive places, and rare items of unique appearance. They may sacrifice utility for style, using inferior equipment or making non-optimum character development choices because it more closely corresponds with their desired self-image. The more detailed and compelling the world, the more there are opportunities for immersion.
Socialization
When players are drawn to Socialize within the game, they will treat it much like any other social setting. They will seek out other players with whom to form relationships (casual or intimate), and talk with them about subjects that extend well beyond the in-game context (politics, sports, the likely contents of the next game patch, who was cybering with the guildmaster's girlfriend, and if "she" is really played by a man). This socialization will often extend beyond the game boundaries to message boards, IM's, real-life gatherings, and other opportunities for social grooming, especially when the player is not able to play the game at that particular moment. To maintain and improve social standing, players will often give in-game currency and items, spend time helping others advance their characters or acquire items, and play classes that are in high demand for groups even though they may be less directly powerful. The more that the game makes players dependent on each other, the greater the opportunities for socialization. If the gameplay does not provide pauses and allow multi-tasking with social activities, the socialization opportunities will be greatly curtailed.
Exploration
Exploration is about the pursuit of knowledge. Players can spend time learning about the world they are embedded in simply in order to know more about it, or with the hope of being able to use this knowledge to pursue goals (including the acquisition of more knowledge). This may involve completely mapping the game world, reverse-engineering the mathematical formula behind game systems, minimaxing the possibility space of character development, or inventorying the non-terrain content of the world (including quests, purchasable items, crafting systems, etc.). They may play any character that opens up opportunity for exploration, but often get bored when they have exhausted the opportunities for a particular character (or game system) and move on to something else. The more "breadth" (emergent complexity) a game system contains, the greater the opportunities for exploration.
The main thing to remember is that motivations are not mutually exclusive. A random player will usually have multiple motivations, to varying degrees. Which he pursues at any given time will depend on the overall balance of motivations and the opportunities for satisfying them that are available to him.
Path-Oriented Game Design
There's a lot of behaviouristic psychology involved in MMO design, and they've often been referred to as "virtual skinner boxes". In general, you'll get a lot further assuming the players are goal-seeking agents like experimental animals in a maze, seeking out their reward and eventually working out the shortest possible path and using it exclusively. But most of our games are essentially only designed for Achievement oriented gameplay, with all other motivations being only accidentally served, and efforts to explicitly serve them have been done in the Achievement style with metrics grafted over the paths. Imagine the "possibility space" of a game as a sort of hyperdimensional maze. The player comes into the world with a desire to reach some end state, and the game offers him various pathways to that end state:
Pathways can be independant, interpendant, incomplete, merging, divergent, or isolated. A path pursuing one motivation may act as a shortcut for others (where a player may wish to Achieve, but Socialization offers access to the fruits of other's Exploration and Mastery, making their own achievement much faster). Or they may wish to strictly Socialize, which draws them into Achievement (in order to have common goals with others), which draws them into Mastery (in order to be able to do their part in supporting the team).
The obvious optimum path for one player may not be attractive to another player, because it requires too much time to be spent following motivations that are weak in them. For example, a player with an extremely high motivation to Explore may find grouping (Socializing) and pursuit of Mastery unacceptable, because those activities do not feel rewarding to him. Even if it would aid his exploration efforts, they might prefer to go it alone.
Frequently it has been assumed that if there was an optimum path to Achievement, all players would pursue that path exclusively and independently of any other. This may be true for some players, but it is not universal. Some players will simply have different motivations, and therefore will pursue different pathways. Even players who feel themselves to be exclusively oriented on one motivation may spend considerable time and effort acting as if they are responding to a different one (as the Achiever who thinks of Socialization as being strictly for roleplayers, but actually spends up to half his time in game chatting).
The question to ask here is: Does this framework help us make better games? It is probably not practical to try to actually plot out the possiblity space of a game in this way, but thinking of it in these terms would seem to offer opportunities for refinement of our "rules of thumb" into working bits of craft. If we think of "Twinking" as players taking a Socialization shortcut down the Achievement pathway, then we can think of it as a potentially desirable activity. If we think of "exploits" and "spoilers" on websites as Exploration shortcuts to Mastery or Achievement, then the role of these sites and their popularity become much clearer.
Motivation As Strategy
In the end, our twisty little passages may be "all alike". The ultimate goal the players seem to be seeking is status, and the motivations may simply be seen as strategies for pursuing it. If we evaluate each motivation as a strategy for gaining cognition and status, then a different picture emerges:
Mastery
Status through the exercise of power, either as an individual or as part of a group. Your use of power may be benign (an equitable calendar system for access to high-level content), impositional (the forceful domination of an "Uber Guild" on raid ccess), or hostile (the disruptive behaviour of "griefers" and "PK's"). Other players look to you for assistance or protection.
Achievement
Status through the maximization of tangible and direct game assets. This can include character abilities, levels, and equipment, as well as in-game housing. Wealth and coveted equipment are not just acquired, you display them and brag about how hard they were to get. Other players look to you for a standard of comparison.
Immersion
Status through memorable and distinctive appearance and behaviour. Your insistence on treating the world as if it were real is combined with an effort to stand out in that environment, as a sort of performance artist. Other players look to you for entertainment.
Socialization
Status from being a social hub, frequently the first to be informed and to inform others of events and news. You know and are known to many different people. Other players look to you for gossip.
Exploration
Status from holding hidden knowledge. You will often encapsulate your acquired knowledge into strategy guides and other public out-of-game displays of wisdom. Other players look to you for tips and advice.
Unique and Special Snowflakes
The players may not, often will not, have a clear and conscious awareness of their motivations, strategies, and goals. The actual actions they take may be entirely tangential to their stated goals and directly contrary to their claimed strategy. Human beings are endlessly capable of self-delusion and rationalization. Attempts to predict the response of players to game systems and goal/obstacle arrangements should focus on actual behaviour and not stated desires.
MAISE should not be taken as a final and authoritive inventory of motivations and strategies, but only as a potentially useful framework. It is entirely possible, even probable, that the motivational framework of the players could be defined in different terms, and those terms might be more useful for a particular purpose. For example, I have conflated all impositional interactions by the players on both the world and each other into Mastery, where others might choose to subdivide them into separate categories such as "Grief", "Leadership", "Group Identity", "Creative Impulse", and so on, or to combine parts of it with what I have defined as Achievement and Exploration.
In fact, the very act of doing so in the course of game design may make it true, at least for that game. In the high-level "Raid" environments of EQ and similar games, Mastery and Achievement are effectively inseparable, and even at lower levels Achievement and Socialization are effectively hand-in-hand pathways if grouping is effectively required by the game structure. More effective and coherent game design might simply be a matter of choosing a framework of motivations and defining your goal/obstacle systems to correspond with that framework.
However, sometimes you don't get to choose your framework: In early Ultima Online, the persistant attributes of the world, the open nature of PvP combat, and the higher rewards of PK activites compared to PvE effectively conflated Achievement with the "grief" aspects of hostile Mastery. In many games, an explicit effort has been made to offer many opportunities for variation in Achievement, but the players quickly realized that only a narrow and specific range of possibilities was dominant, as in Asheron's Call 1, where the millions of possible combinations of skill advancement were quickly reduced by the players to a handful of "Extreme" templates. Much of this may be the result of having a limited or inaccurate view of player motives (in this case, assuming players would be more interested in Immersion than Achievement).
Ultimately, the core of this framework is the presumption that the player's draw to and continued residence in these games is a response to fundamental desires not too different from those that drive behaviour in the real world, but in an artificial environment where many of the obscuring complexities of layered strategic interaction have been removed. Learning more about how to make virtual worlds will tell us more about how people act in the real one, and vice-versa.
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