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Jun 15, 2005

Comments

1.

nice work greg, v useful!
see y'all there.
ren

2.

Gawd, it's going to take me weeks to read through that lot!

Richard

3.

Looking forward to seeing you all in Vancouver--my home town! Wewt!

4.

Just briefly reviewing some of the abstracts of the papers to be presented, I think I'm seeing a common thread.

If the measure of any theory's value is how many people spend large chunks of their time trying to poke holes in it, then the original Players Who Suit MUDs typology has to rank as one of the most important theories of play of all time.

Man... is there anyone who doesn't want to try to whack this piñata? :-)

--Flatfingers

5.

Flatfingers>If the measure of any theory's value is how many people spend large chunks of their time trying to poke holes in it, then the original Players Who Suit MUDs typology has to rank as one of the most important theories of play of all time.

That's why I expanded the theory in my book. At least now if they want to beat on it, they have to have paid me a royalty to do so!

I haven't read any of the anti-Bartle papers yet, but if past experience is anything to go by at least half of them will be due to misconceptions I could easily have pointed out if only the authors had got in touch with me first. People very rarely do this, though, with the result that when our paths do finally cross I wind up looking mean for criticising them in public. As I've said before, I'm not dead and I do have email.

I don't actually mind my theory being attacked if we get a better theory as a result. We never do get such a theory, though. Even Nick Yee's constant assault on the model hasn't got any underlying theory explain it. It's like I'm a physicist saying that stars in general should follow a particular lifecycle and he's an astronomer saying that there are a bunch of other ways stars in some particular galaxies can be looked at: it's interesting data, but it explains nothing. Every year, Nick publishes more data showing his categorisation to be valid; every year, I explain how this still fits into my theory; every year, Nick asks more questions that address my new explanation; and so it continues. We're getting some good results here, but when are we going to see a model that explains why people fit his facets, rather than why his facets aren't an exact match for my model? Nick doesn't have to do this himself - he makes his data freely available to all researchers? Why aren't people picking it up and doing something with it? If my model has flaws (and it does), use Nick's data to develop a new theory that doesn't have those flaws.

I want to see new theories, not merely new stats. I want to see people who are interested in developing ideas because their ideas are intrinsically useful, not people who just want to take on the grizzled old gunslinger whose heart isn't in it any more. The roots of that HCDS paper go back 15 years, based on an analysis of a long discussion: surely it's not impossible for someone to go off and do their own such discussion and analysis to develop their own theory as a result? Why is so much effort spent in chipping away at the one theory we currently have? Why don't we see any new theories?

Maybe I should just take the paper's web pages off the net and make people come up with new theories instead of constantly rehearsing the old ones?

Richard

6.

Richard> I don't actually mind my theory being attacked if we get a better theory as a result. We never do get such a theory, though.

Exactly. It's interesting and helpful to get real-world data. But to understand the meaning of those data and to know how best to apply them require an attempt to discern a pattern to them. Why are those the data we get, and not something else? Why do people act that way, and not some other way?

Without a Theory of Why that proposes a pattern, how do you know what other data to look for? How do you fill in the gaps of a model if you have no model?

This leads me to wonder whether there's always a model, even if it's not made explicit. If I say that "preferences are uncorrelated; humans can want more than one thing at a time," isn't that a model of personality?

Is that model somehow innately better than "people can want one thing more than other things"? Why? What makes it so clearly superior that the alternative can be dismissed as "putting people in boxes"?

Why consider these models mutually exclusive? Why can't both theories (and others) have something useful to say about why people act the way they do? If there's no such thing as one perfect theory, then why not be open to using multiple theories that, as long as they can be shown to have some predictive power, fill in each other's gaps?

If nothing else, the HCDS model has been great for energizing the conversation about gamer personality types. I think there's been real value in having a description of this model available on the web.

But having said that, sure -- I'd also like to see some alternative models. Nick's data could be the starting point for such models... so where are they?

Richard> Maybe I should just take the paper's web pages off the net and make people come up with new theories instead of constantly rehearsing the old ones?

Speaking personally, I hope that doesn't happen. For every one person who gets stuck on it, I suspect there are thousands over the course of a year for whom it generates the eye-opening realization that people play games for different reasons, and that this diversity is a Good Thing.

Even a bad model can be a good start. And this isn't a bad model.

--Flatfingers

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