Genres and Player Profiles

Before this:What Is a Game

What you’ll be able to do

• Explain what a genre promises a player before they press start
• Describe player motivation as a profile rather than a personality type
• Name a target player for your game without saying “everyone”
• Pick honest comparable titles

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Genre is a promise

A genre is not a category you file a game under. It is a set of expectations a player brings with them.

Someone who opens a roguelike expects to die and start over, and expects that to be the point. Someone who opens a cozy sim expects no fail state. If your game says “platformer” and then punishes precision, you have not made a bold choice, you have broken a promise.

So picking a genre is a design decision. It tells you what players will already understand without a tutorial, and what will surprise them. Both are useful.

Player types, and why the famous one is dated

You will run into Bartle’s taxonomy constantly. Richard Bartle proposed it in 1996 and it sorts players into four types: achievers, explorers, socializers, and killers.

It is worth knowing because everyone references it. It is also worth knowing what is wrong with it. Bartle built it from observing players of MUDs, text-based multiplayer worlds that predate graphics entirely, and researchers have criticized it since for exactly that reason: a model derived from 1990s text games is a questionable fit for modern games with far more complex interactions. The bigger problem is that it sorts people into four boxes, and real players do not sit in one box.

Motivations are scales, not boxes

The research moved on. Nick Yee re-analyzed the same questions and found that motivations work better as continuous dimensions than as types, meaning a player can score high on several at once.

That work became the Gamer Motivation Model from Quantic Foundry, built on survey data from over a million players. It describes twelve motivations in six pairs:

Nobody is one of these. Everybody is a mix, and the mix is what you design for. A player who scores high on Strategy and Completion wants very different things from a player who scores high on Excitement and Destruction, even if both of them tell you they like shooters.

The practical version for your own project: pick two or three motivations you are designing for and write them down. Then when you are deciding whether to add a feature, you have something to check it against.

Who is this for

“Everyone” is not an audience. It is what people say when they have not thought about it.

A real answer names the player: what else they play, how much time they have in one sitting, what platform they are on, and what they are hoping to feel. “Players who like tight movement challenges and can only play for twenty minutes at a time” is an audience. You can design for that.

Comparables

Naming two or three released games similar to yours is how you communicate a concept fast, and it is standard practice in real pitches.

The convention is to pick comparables at a realistic scope: games with a budget and audience in the same neighborhood as yours. Comparing a small project to a massive hit like Elden Ring is treated as a red flag in the industry, because it signals you have not thought seriously about your own scale.

Good comparables sound like: “It plays like Celeste and looks like Sable.” That sentence does more work than a paragraph.

Try it

Terms

Genre · Player motivation · Bartle taxonomy · Gamer Motivation Model · Target audience · Comparables (comps)

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