We Are Explorers

On the subject of repetition, which came up in conversation around here the other day, why not let's go yet another round with Dr. Richard Bartle and his famous four archetypes? I had other plans for the morning but then I read Rowan's post Revisiting Bartle and now look where we are!

On the subject of repetition, this is another great opportunity to out myself as having a really poor memory. I could claim that as an excuse for repeating myself but honestly I usually know when I'm doing that. I have selective forgetfulness only I'm not always the one making the selection.

It's facts I forget. I forget facts a lot. At school I wasn't great at the subjects that required learning long lists of dates or formulas. (This is "Getting to Know You Week" in Blaugust, right?). I was much better at the ones where you were tasked with analyzing information and drawing conclusions but best of all at those that solicited opinions. (Anyone surprised? Thought not.)

I've read Bartle's original paper more than once. There's a strong possibility I've at least glanced through it every time I've posted on the topic or done the test, which has been a few times now. Even so, I didn't recognize the definition of Explorer quoted by Rowan as having been taken verbatim from that original paper.

 

Here's how it's defined there:

ii) Explorers delight in having the game expose its internal machinations to them. They try progressively esoteric actions in wild, out-of-the-way places, looking for interesting features (ie. bugs) and figuring out how things work. Scoring points may be necessary to enter some next phase of exploration, but it's tedious, and anyone with half a brain can do it. Killing is quicker, and might be a constructive exercise in its own right, but it causes too much hassle in the long run if the deceased return to seek retribution. Socialising can be informative as a source of new ideas to try out, but most of what people say is irrelevant or old hat. The real fun comes only from discovery, and making the most complete set of maps in existence.

Explorers say things like:

        "Hmm..."
        "You mean you don't know the shortest route from <obscure
         room 1> to <obscure room 2>?"
        "I haven't tried that one, what's it do?"
        "Why is it that if you carry the uranium you get radiation
         sickness, and if you put it in a bag you still get it, but if
         you put it in a bag and drop it then wait 20 seconds and pick it
         up again, you don't?"

Both the definition and the examples are fully valid exemplars of what I would consider to be Explorer archetype behavior. I have literally typed "Hmm..." into guild chat on more occasions than I could possibly recall and I frequently ask questions about game mechanics in open chat channels, usually with no expectation of a meaningful reply.

I am most definitely an Explorer. I've tested that way every time I've taken it. I took it again this morning and things came out much as they always do:

The Bartle Test of Gamer Psychology

You are 87% Explorer

 

You are also:

60% Achiever

40% Socialiser

13% Killer

This result may be abbreviated as EASK

I think that's quite fair. I don't quibble with the results. I quibble with the definitions. Rowan really put his finger on the problem when he wrote

"It is worth noting that he [Bartle] was talking about (and possibly promoting) a specific type of game: Multi-User Dungeons. While MMORPGs share many traits with MUDs, they are not the same. And few MMO players have ever played a MUD."

In all the times I've posted about the Bartle Test and the Archetypes I can't remember talking about that specific point. Of course, that might be my memory failing but it might also be a good example of what's so important about repetition. Only by coming back to a topic over and over again can new understanding be achieved.

 

Here's the thing: as virtual worlds, MUDs exist as a series of "rooms" which players perceive by way of written descriptions. As games they are primarily text-based and players interact with them by typed commands. As social spaces they are text-based chat rooms. (I speak here with all the authority of someone who has never played one for more than a few minutes out of curiosity. I'm sure someone, most probably Wilhelm, will correct me if I've gotten any of that grossly wrong). 

Although some MUDs may have used iconography to add a visual element, MUDs were not and are not primarily a visual medium. Mmorpgs are. 

Even before the move to 3D, which happened very quickly, the first mmorpgs were extremely visually rich environments. I played Ultima Online for a couple of months back around the turn of the millennium and although it couldn't and didn't have the visceral impact on me that EverQuest did, it was still visually absorbing enough to sweep me up and take me in.

They say the pictures are better in your head (Who are they? Where and when did they say that? About what?) and it's true, to an extent. I didn't play MUDs in the 80s and 90s but I did play a lot of single-player text-based adventure games and it was entirely possible for me to "feel like I was there" at times.

After I'd played Eye of the Beholder 2, though, text-based descriptions just didn't cut it for me any more. And when I found myself lost in the dark in the East Commonlands woods with wolves howling and magical explosions lighting up the night... well, there was no going back to purely written description.

 

If the visual and sonic experience was so intense two decades ago with the primitive technology of the late '90s, how much more overwhelming and all-embracing must it be today, with ray tracing and full motion body capture and sweeping orchestral scores in concert-hall quality audio fidelity? It's not even the difference between an MCU blockbuster and a Keaton black and white comedy - it's Avengers: Endgame versus a faded daguerrotype from the 1850s.

In the bookshop where I work we sell almost no books on video games but the few we do have are massive, expensive coffee-table books dedicated to the sheer gorgeousness of the graphics. Some of them shelve in the art department next to the Matisses and Rothkos. We have books in the architecture section about the cities in games. It can only be a matter of time before publishers start adding game worlds to their travel photography lists.

When I identify as an "Explorer" archetype, this is what I'm picturing. Vast oceans and mountains, real and surreal landscapes, medieval villages and futuristic cities. Strange creatures, stranger people, wild fashions and fantastic devices. Towers that spiral away into the cloud-streaming skies and tunnels that disappear into the deep bismuth caverns of the mountains. I'm not thinking about whether or not my character gets sick from taking something out of a bag.

Yes, I do explore the mechanics of the games and yes I do get a sense of satisfaction from knowing where things are and how to get to them but that's a minor chord in a sweeping symphony. Mostly I explore to see things. 

 

As we've discussed many times, and of course it bears repeating because repetition is so important, graphics are not gameplay. Neither do graphics equal immersion. As Wilhem points out in the post linked earlier, EverQuest didn't even have particularly impressive graphics for 1999 and yet it was almost unbearably immersive. 

The same "picures in your head" trope can apply to graphical mmorpgs as it can for text-based MUDs. It's possible to look past the linoleum textures and blocky character models to see the truth of the world they show with your inner eye. The early mmorpgs may represent some kind of halfway house between what Bartle was describing and where we are now.

When I glide through the jungles at the heart of Maguuma in Guild Wars 2, spiraling upwards on thermals, soaring over sky islands fashioned from roots and flowers or when I stand in the busy market square in Bless Unleashed, surrounded by the buzz and chatter of festival day, marveling at the dust in the air, the grain in the wood, there's almost no part of my mind that's engaged in making stuff up to fill in the gaps. The vibrant, complex visual worlds we explore in modern-day mmorpgs are there, ready and waiting to be explored in just the way places we might be visit in our own world wait to be discovered. Or that's how it feels.

When I think of the Explorer archetype in the light of my own experience, the time I've spent playing mmorpgs, that's what comes to mind. All the sights I've seen, all the screenshots I've taken, all the places I've, yes, explored. 

I can't say for sure whether I would have felt that way about the described rooms in the MUDs of Dr. Richard Bartle's day but from my analogous experience in text adventures back then I doubt it. I can remember the plots and characters from some of those games but it's only with the advent of graphical adventure games that I can remember what anything looked like. Which, of course, not to repeat myself, could say more about my memory than it does about the games. 

I'm fairly sure much the same could be said about the Socializer and Achiever archetypes. The magnitudes by which the possibilities for both of these have expanded over the decades since the test was devised renders the original definitions as distant and divorced from present experience as graphical improvements do the Explorer.

Socializing in modern mmorpgs hasn't just altered in the means but in the purpose. Bartle's definition begins "Socialisers are interested in people, and what they have to say. The game is merely a backdrop, a common ground where things happen to players" and goes on at some length to describe meaningful, intimate, complex social relationships. Socialization in modern mmorpgs frequently means drama over DPS meters or drive-by invites to mega-guilds where almost no-one ever speaks.

While socialization has arguably withered and dried out, Achieving has grown to become the tail that wags the dragon. Bartle's definition only mentions "levels" and "points" as marks of achievement. Just about any mmorpg in the 2020s attaches "achievements" to every aspect of the game, including Exploring, Socializing and Killing. 

There's not much you can do in an mmorpg these days that doesn't flag up an Achievement. It's hardly surprising that my secondary archetype is now Achieving (60%). It used to be Socializing but who needs to do that any more, amirite?

 

Perhaps the only original archetype that hasn't really changed is the Killer. Or maybe that's because Dr Bartle took a pretty jaundiced view of the sociotype to begin with. Here's how he imagined Killers talking:

"Killers says things like:

        "Ha!"
        "Coward!"
        "Die!"
        "Die! Die! Die!"

(Killers are people of few words)."

It's a good joke but I suspect even in the mid-90s some self-described "Killers" might have taken exception to it. I'm absolutely certain today's PvP and RvR aficionados would exhibit a self-disproving eloquence to dispute that take on their craft.

It's been said many times before (Go repetition!) that the Bartle Archetypes need revising. There have been several attempts to update or create new ones but somehow they never seem to gain much traction. Bartle's four stick. 

And that's fine. They're clear, simple, easy to remember. They have the authority of close observation and academic rigor. It's just a pity that, when it comes to mmorpgs, they were probably never all that close to reality in the first place and whatever congruence they did have recedes further into the past with every passing day.

Zing! Went The Strings Of My Explorer's Heart : ArcheAge

Both Guild Wars 2 and WildStar make a particular play for what they appear to perceive, inaccurately, as the Bartle Explorer archetype. ArenaNet sprinkled Points of Interest across Tyria like hundreds and thousands  , raised scores of flags in high places and called them "Vistas". Then they slapped on a few rewards and titles and wrapped the whole mess up in a nested set of tick-boxes they called Achievements. Carbine went the extra mile and created an entire Explorer "Path".

This is all well and good. Following these breadcrumb trails can be fun. I enjoy a little of it myself when I'm in the mood. As has been observed by many before me, however, it has about as much to do with "exploring" as Painting By Numbers has to do with Fine Art. It's Exploring for Achievers, basically, and Achievers are a much easier target. Rewarding  Explorers can be something of an existential challenge.

If that doesn't make you want to go and explore you may have chosen the wrong hobby.

The first time I ran across an actual in-game "Achievement" system was, I believe, in Lord of the Rings Online. As I remember it, you'd be out and about, doing some important task for a puffy-faced Hobbit farmer down in The Shire, and right in the middle of killing some oversized gnats a great message would pop up announcing that henceforth you would be known as "The Crop-saviour". It was quite the novelty at the time.

Looking at the LotRO wiki I see that the Deeds system, as it's called, also breaks down into four quasi-Bartle categories, one of which is called "Explorer". I have no memory of that at all. Mostly I remember killing stuff for titles. They call those "Slayer" Deeds. Why they didn't go with Bartle's "Killer", who can say? Perhaps they thought it didn't sound sufficiently Tolkeinian.

Whether they use his exact nomenclature or not, however, Western MMO developers seem to be big on Bartle. How far East the Professor's influence extends is less clear. Jake Song and XLGames certainly didn't consider it necessary to kit each character out with a Book of Adventure or Tome of Discovery, nor even to add a plain old Achievement Panel to the UI.

Photo opportunities are few and far between in an ArcheAge sewer.

That doesn't mean there's no Achievement system in ArcheAge. There is. Sort of. Or rather there used to be. This Reddit thread explains it in detail. The gist is you used to get rewards for doing various things that might be called "Achievements" in other games. Later those rewards were removed but the triggers weren't.

When Trion localized the game they used the version with the triggers but without the rewards and guess what? That turns out to be the best way to reward Explorers for doing what they do naturally that I've yet seen in any MMO so far.

In all the palaver about overpopulated servers, queues, bots, hacks, PvP, farming, naval warfare, housing shortages and all the rest, one thing that's easy to miss is that ArcheAge offers something that approximates a virtual world. Granted it often feels like you're exploring the half-finished set for a movie, what with all the (NPC) houses no-one bothered to furnish and the (PC) houses no-one bothered to finish building, but, still, there definitely is plenty of "there" there.

Yes, I'm doing the backstroke. I'm in a sewer. So would you.

With no zone boundaries and reasonably unrestricted movement - if you can see something you have a better-than-even chance of being able to get to it - ArcheAge demands to be explored. If you're that way inclined, that is. Which I am.

The world of ArcheAge (I wish they'd give it a name) has reminded many an ex-Vanguard player of Telon for this reason as well as for the textural familiarity and the occasional musical memory. I spent an unconscionable amount of time exploring Thestra, Qalia and Kojan for the sheer fun of it and it's going much the same way in ArcheAge. Cantering from quest to quest I'll spot a cave or a windmill across a field and off I go.

The difference between Vanguard and ArcheAge in this respect is the zing. In Vanguard I felt it in my bones. In ArcheAge I can see it in the air. Literally. And hear it too.

One  part pony, three parts mountain goat.

I'm not having flashbacks. It's not my temporal lobes flaring up. Not this time, anyway. It's those leftover triggers. Occasionally, when I poke my nose into somewhere that looks interesting, there's a shimmering sound from the speakers and a scatter of sparks on the screen. That's where I would have received one of Nui's Tears had that currency not been removed.

It's perfect. Most of the time when I go exploring the reward is just as it should be - satisfied curiosity, occasional adventure, incidental terror. Props to Two Crowns for having a proper sewer system. That was a scary half-hour in the dank dark. Now and again, however, often when I do something a little out of the ordinary, like riding my horse up the side of a carnival marquee, I'll hit one of those disconnected triggers and...Zing!

Its a gift that you can't keep or covet. It happens too fast and unexpectedly even to snap a screenshot. It's a virtual pat on the back, a nod of the head, as if the game is offering you a wink and a wry smile. It feels great.

They may have got there by accident but XL and Trion may have come up with the perfect way to reward Explorers just for exploring.

None Of The Above : The Bartle Archetypes

Jeromai had some very interesting things to say about the current World vs World Season, tying neatly into the ongoing debate on Achievements. While I was reading it occurred to me that one of the foundations of the whole discourse might be developing a slight wobble, namely The Bartle Test.

We all know the provenance of this, I'm sure. Anyone who doesn't can get up to speed in a minute or two at Wikipedia. We all quote the Archetypes and our own four-letter formula and score whenever it seems relevant. What I don't know and have never really even thought about before today is whether it still merits the attention we give it almost twenty years on.

Richard Bartle posited the four archetypes, Explorer, Achiever, Socializer, Killer back in 1996 and we've all just gone along with them ever since. Do we really think those are the only four motivations driving players? Are they sufficient to explain all player behaviors in all MMOs over the last two decades? Do they accurately, sufficiently and exhaustively describe the entire and full range of psychological factors that drive every individual to play and to keep playing these games?

Killer

Doctor Bartle didn't pluck the archetypes out of the air. As he says in the preamble to the very readable, chatty paper that started all this, they were condensed from the comments of several hundred posts on a bulletin board belonging to a MUD, a lengthy conversation to which some thirty people in total contributed, the bulk of the comments being made by half that number.

The four archetypes having been distilled from this boiling pot of argument, some time later two entirely different individuals developed the Test we all know and which we take and retake just in case we might have had some kind of personality change since the last time we tried it. The test itself reminds me of nothing so much as those "Is He Really Right For You?" quizzes so popular in teenage magazines of the 1970s and 80s, in which you would frequently end up checking a box against something you would never in a million years say or do simply because the other options seemed even less plausible.

Achiever

Whether there is any scientific validity in this methodology per se I have no idea. To what degree this kind of psychometric testing, if that's indeed the category under which it falls, can be considered to be part of the Scientific Method, I couldn't say. If there's any kind of recognized peer review process for this sort of thing (if there even is a "thing" for this to be a sort of) I wouldn't know.

Either which way, it seems odd that one man's summary of fifteen people having a heated discussion on a MUD bulletin board almost twenty years ago (with another fifteen kibbitzing and chiming in from the sidelines) should have come to form the basis of design decisions for an entire genre of entertainment that didn't even exist at the time the discussion took place.

I never played MUDs, having graduated University in 1981 and having anyway read English, meaning I never even saw a computer let alone used one. It was a little after Richard Bartle wrote his first paper that I got my first home dial-up and by the time I was ready to consider using it to play games online Everquest had been out for over six months.

Socializer

Consequently I can't say from personal experience whether the Bartle Archetypes accurately represent the full range of activities available to MUD players. I would contend, though, that even if they did they fall some way short of describing the options available to players of modern MMOs.

It's true that one can almost always collate any number of human activities under larger and larger catch-alls so no doubt an argument can be made that KASE covers all bases, but I wonder if such reductio ad absurdum methodology really gets us all that far? When I spend four hours on a Sunday morning sorting my banks, something I've been doing for many years, which archetype is that, precisely? When I do my dailies with no intention whatsoever of using any or the rewards but just because they make for a pleasant, soothing, familiar routine that relaxes me when I get home from work, where does that fit? When I swing the camera about while I run up and down the ramps in Black Citadel as a Charr for the umpteenth time, imagining I'm really a giant cat, what am I exploring, achieving, or killing?

I know I can't be socializing because there's no-one there but me and isn't that another thing that's changed out of recognition since the MUD days? So much of one's time in a modern MMO can be spent entirely alone, and amusingly so. If I spend a week moving the furniture around in a virtual house that no-one but I will ever see, or working nostalgically through quests I've done a dozen times before, this time on a character that I know will soon be sent back into the limbo of character select, half-forgotten, rarely if ever to be called upon again, which archetype am I fulfilling? In spending hour after hour concentrating on visual images while playing alone, am I even playing in the same ontological space as that inhabited by the text-adventuring, community-oriented participants of that seminal bulletin board discussion all those years ago?

Explorer

Next year we expect to see the launch of a multi-million dollar, triple-A MMORPG overtly and proudly based on Archetypes : WildStar. Carbine stuck with four but kept just one of the names; Explorer. The other three they changed to Soldier, Settler and Scientist. Whether it's a nomenclature that represents the behavior of the current wave of MMO players more accurately than Bartle's established quartet we will find out in due course. I rather doubt it.

The more I think about the whole thing, the less I feel represented by any of the terms in play, old or new. Where's Potterer or Observer? What about Collector or Organiser? Photographer or Sightseer? If we can, as is entirely possible in many MMOs nowadays, play for hours, days, even weeks without exploring anywhere, achieving anything, killing anyone or communicating with another human being, and yet still have a really fun time doing it, mightn't it be time to lay the old archetypes to rest?

Or at least come up with some new ones?

What's So Wild About WildStar?

Syl is unconvinced by WildStar's Explorer Path. Me too. I'm not surprised by it, though.

"Explorer" in current MMO terms mostly means "Achiever with a Map". In fact, as far as most MMOs from the last half-decade or more are concerned, Dr. Bartle could have saved himself a lot of time and trouble. He might as well have defined just the one profile, The Achiever, and left it at that. In MMO development terms every other human behavior is merely a sub-set of Achieving.

He had a great name, too. Redacted.

Which really makes quite a lot of sense, commercially. Development time is finite, Achievements are easy to produce and The Achiever is arguably the only one of the profiles that needs MMO content crafted specifically for it. Well, okay, Killers, but if you take the killing out of the MMO you end up with Tales of the Desert and no AAA developer wants to go there.

If Killing is catered for by the default gameplay, Socializing is hardwired into the players themselves. Even if you literally remove the chat interface entirely, something that again no mainstream developer is going to do, Socializers will find each other and hang out. I offer you The Endless Forest. In a mainstream MMO socializing is non-stop. That's why you have to keep switching the open chat channels off. The participants may not be well-socialized but that's hardly the point.

I'm the tall one at the back trying not to look conspicuous.

And Explorers? They're the people climbing up buildings, diving beneath the waves, rummaging around in ruins. All on their own, minding no-one else's business. At most they might take a few screenshots. Explorers define themselves. They don't need anyone else's validation. They do require something to explore, but as with the killing, if we're talking about MMOs that have the least pretension to be any kind of Virtual World, explorability is a given.

If people like her have them, how elite can they be?

That leaves Achievers. It's possible to self-start an achievement, of course. Set your own goals, meet them, sit back satisfied. Achievers used to do that. Some still do. But as the wiki has it, "One of the appeals of online gaming to the Achiever is that he or she has the opportunity to show off their skill and hold elite status to others". An achievement that's only known to the achiever is scarcely an achievement at all.

In the olden days that elite status was marked out by the level number alongside your name or the Short Sword of Ykesha in your pixel hand. Nowadays everyone's Max Level in days, even hours, prancing around the bank draped in particle effects from horns to tail-tip. How is anyone supposed to know how special you are?

Is that good? I have no idea.

By checking your Achievements, of course! Every MMO has to have them, neatly tabulated and codified. They have names and ranks for handy comparison. Now you know where you stand. And in GW2 they even add up to a single number than can be called upon to verify your credentials in a wide range of circumstances. It's like a Gear Score only you can wave it at people who don't even do dungeons!

Hey Dr. Bartle! You forgot The Slacker !

Like Syl I'm nowhere near map completion on my most achieved character in GW2. Moreover, I have thousands of hours played on ten characters, seven of them at max level, and most of them have map completion somewhere down in the 20-30% range. Have I not been exploring?

Of course I have! I've been in all kinds of fascinating, strange, wonderful, peculiar places. GW2 is stuffed to bursting point with them but only a fraction are marked on the map. Such Map Completion as I've acquired has largely been achieved (there's that word again) by happenstance, serendipity and good old-fashioned nosiness. Sometimes there just happens to be one of those markers on the map in the place I spotted that looked intriguing. I can't help that. It's Map Completion by mistake.

The Game Developer's Mantra

So I'm all about the exploring but no matter how they big it up, the more Carbine reveal about Exploring in WildStar, the less interested I become. Unlike Syl I'm far from being "so over the Warcraft cartoon aesthetic", probably because I only played WoW for a short while and anyway, cartoons, what's not to like? That's not a problem. All the endless codifying of how we're supposed to behave, that's the problem. WildStar is shaping up to become the most dirigist MMO of all time, or that's how it appears from the way Carbine are promoting it.

Does it matter? In the end we play the way we want to play, don't we? I think so. The trouble with games developers is they're almost always gamers too. They play the way they want to play as well but they also get to set the parameters for the rest of us. Anyone want to take a guess how much of an Achiever you need to be to make it in Game Development?