PLAYERS/GAMERS
While play and game are words that orbit the same semantic fields (amusement, entertainment, sports, etc.), a game is not a play, and playing is not the same as gaming. Correspondingly, a player might not be the same person as a gamer. But what differentiates these types of video game users, and what are the borderline cases that exist between—and at the periphery of—the two? This essay explores multiple approaches toward game and play in an effort to more clearly highlight the differences between categories of the video game users.
Origins
Any attempt to better differentiate, and then categorize, players and gamers must inevitably start with an examination of the terms in English (for a study of play-related terms in many languages, see Johan Huizinga’s second chapter of his book Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture ([1938] 1955), titled “The play-concept as expressed in language”). According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “play” finds its roots in the Old English words pleg(i)an (to exercise) and plega (brisk movement), as well as being related to the Middle Dutch pleien (to leap for joy, to dance). Play is part of many semantic fields revolving more or less closely around the ideas of entertainment, pleasure, and joy: “to play a role,” “to play an instrument,” “to play sports,” “to play on words,” etc. And, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “game” is derived from the Old English gamen (amusement, fun) and gamenian (to play, to amuse oneself), which are words of Germanic origin that, like play, are usually correlated with entertainment. While playing is related to most amusement-related activities, gaming has a somewhat narrower applicability, being mostly used to denote playing board games (which have existed since at least the days of ancient Egypt), and a more recently-devised activity: taking part in pen-and-paper role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons (TSR, 1974) (while pen-and-paper role-playing games can be considered “board games,” the board’s main use here is to enhance the gaming experience and is, in many cases, optional). Likewise, while a player is the person partaking in recreational diversions in a general sense, a gamer is more specifically a player of board games and pen-and-paper role-playing games, or, more recently (and, perhaps, more prominently), a player of video games.
Thus, it seems that words associated with “game” (such as gaming and gamer) are closer to our object of interest than, say, those associated with “play” (such as playing and player), which covers a broader semantic range. Still, reflecting on “play” rather than “game” has been the driving force behind the theorists that preceded video game scholars, and it behooves us to refer to the work of three great pre-video game thinkers before getting to the players and the gamers themselves.
Three Ways of Thinking about Play before Video Games
Even though the first three authors discussed below display more interest in playing and games than in players and gamers, their approaches provided essential intellectual ground for video games scholars when the field was defining itself. A brief summary of their thoughts is therefore in order.
In the opening chapter of his book Homo Ludens, first published in 1938, Dutch historian Johan Huizinga ([1938] 1955) mentions that other scholars preceded him in the attempt to define “play,” but that they limited their analysis of it as a biological function. Huizinga instead goes for a more Platonic approach, bringing up the aesthetic and cultural qualities of play and treating it as a fundamental human function. For Huizinga, play is irrational, different from ordinary life, opposed to seriousness, uncertain, secluded in space, and limited in time; but above all, play is a voluntary and free activity. Huizinga’s homo ludens is also, by definition, a homo liber—a free man. Huizinga identifies a few forms of play in his writings: play as the activity of the sportsman, of the actor, of the musician, and even of the priest, each being a “player” in their own way. He mentions two problematic types of players: the cheaters (the ones who are only pretending to play the game), and the spoil-sports (the ones who ignore the rules or choose to go against them). Despite his descriptive work, Huizinga doesn’t propose a classification or a categorization of the forms of play. A suggestion for this much-needed schema would come from a rereading of Huizinga by Roger Caillois, a French author and philosopher.
In his book Man, Play and Games, first published in 1958, Caillois (2006), like Huizinga before him, insists on the freedom of the player to play the game, noting that this freedom must be a characteristic situated above all else for the game to be considered a game, adding that the player must be able to leave the game at any time. Caillois proposes a model for sorting the forms of games. In this model, we first find a continuum that ranges between two poles, the pole of the ludus, associated with the competition and the respect of the rules, and the pole of the paidia, associated with a certain willingness to create disorder, and even perhaps a certain level of playful destruction. Caillois also proposes four categories to better characterize types of games, a classification based on the activity that is dominant in any given game: competition (agôn), chance (alea), simulation (mimicry), or vertigo (ilinx). Caillois highlights striking oppositions between some of those categories, most notably related to the attitude that Caillois ascribes to players of agôn games on one hand, and of alea games on the other. The necessary attitudes for those two types of games are opposites, agôn being “a vindication of personal responsibility,” while alea is not only “a negation of the will,” but also “a surrender to destiny” (pp. 133–134). Caillois thus attributes a passive attitude to players of games of chance, and an active attitude to players of competitive games. Also, just as Huizinga did, Caillois addresses the spoil-sports (whom he describes as nihilists) and the cheaters, two particularly problematic types of players who resist his taxonomical efforts.
A third study must be addressed before broaching the subject of the player and the gamer: Bernard Suits’s book titled The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia (1978). In the course of his research on the necessary characteristics of what a game is and isn’t (a process driven by a dialectical and almost pedagogical approach), Suits identifies four essential elements that characterize a game. Considered together, these four elements mean that to play a game is
to attempt to achieve a specific state of affairs [what Suits calls the prelusory goal], using only means permitted by rules [called the lusory means], where the rules prohibit use of more efficient means in favor of less efficient ones [those rules are known as the constitutive rules], and where the rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity [the state of mind necessary for the player to accept such conditions is designated as the lusory attitude].
(2006, p. 190)
Suits also provides his own pocket-sized version of his definition: “playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles” (p. 190). The four elements mentioned are essential for “game playing” to occur, but Suits assigns a predominant role to the lusory attitude, for it is what links the goals, the means, and the rules together. Still, Suits identifies a kind of overarching meta-element that surpasses all others: the players must always be able to quit the game as they see fit. For Suits, just as with Huizinga and Caillois before him, the fundamental property of play is the freedom of the player.
Now that play, its attributes, and its characteristics have been covered, it is time to focus on the users, on the people who are engaged in the playing activity—but are these people players, or are they rather best described as gamers?
From Player to Gamer to Gameplayer
In 2003, Bernard Perron proposed a distinction between the player, which was (and still is) a widely used term to describe the person engaged in any kind of play activities (sports, music, video games, etc.), and the gamer, a term mostly promoted by the video game industry to label its own adepts. Then, Perron goes even further in his distinctions by coining the term gameplayer.
In his rereading of Caillois’s attitude, Perron associates the player with the paidia pole of the ludus–paidia continuum. The player has the attitude of an improviser taking decisions in complete impunity. He or she is more likely to enjoy video games that don’t fundamentally have clear objectives, such as The Sims (Maxis, 2000). Suits would probably say that the player isn’t necessarily attracted to games that ask of the user to achieve a specific state of affairs. The player is also the one who yearns for the exhilaration and the controlled chaos found in video games—this yearning that translates as the abandonment or suspension of respect for the objectives dictated by the game. For example, playing a gangster-themed open-world game such as Grand Theft Auto III (DMA Design and Rockstar Vienna, 2001) “as a player” would mean exploring the city in a stolen car, purely for the sake of the enjoyment derived from this (whether the process involves running over pedestrians or not).
The gamer, meanwhile, is more closely linked to the ludus pole of the continuum: the gamer “goes for the challenge” (p. 244) and desires to win the game by achieving the goals and objectives decreed by the game. Playing Grand Theft Auto III “as a gamer” would involve trying to fulfill the objectives that the game specifically imposes, from destroying nine espresso stands (part of the “Espresso-2-Go!” mission) to killing three Triad warlords (part of the “Triads and Tribulations” mission). Between the player and the gamer, it is the latter who holds the most respect for the means, goals, and rules needed to sustain the play activity. The gamer is also the one who is the most thoroughly engaged in the lusory attitude, an attitude that sustains itself on a certain dose of illusion. Just as Huizinga and Caillois before him, Perron recalls the common roots between play and illusion: “the ludic attitude implies ‘an intention of illusion’; illusion (in-lusio) meaning nothing less than beginning a game” (p. 241).
In contrast, while also associated with the ludus pole, the gameplayer doesn’t partake in illusion. The gameplayers of Grand Theft Auto III set a whole new collection of parallel goals for themselves (they mostly see the goals set by the game at best as suggestions, or at worst as obligatory hurdles to overcome before getting to more interesting challenges). While the gameplayers might assume the attitude of the cheater, they don’t intend to circumvent the rules, but rather to reappropriate them in order to face challenges that they invent for themselves. Such players are “meta-players”: people who will “literally make their own game of the game” (p. 252).
Typologies
In 1996, Richard Bartle proposed a framework for classifying players found in MUDs (multiple user domains) into four types (socializers, killers, achievers, and explorers), in what Espen Aarseth calls “a general model of human behaviour in virtual environments” and “perhaps the best analysis of players and playing we have seen so far” (2003, p. 3). While MUD games weren’t dominant at the time (and have never quite been), Bartle’s typology remains useful even in non-MUD video games, and especially in the more widespread MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games).
Bartle first conceptualized two axes governing the styles of play, the first extending between the poles of “action” and “interaction,” and the second between “world-oriented” and “player-oriented” poles. The intersection of those two axes forms four quadrants, corresponding to four different playing styles that Bartle associates with four types of players. Though this may seem like a rather perilous approach, we will “couple” Bartle’s and Perron’s typologies—keeping in mind that Bartle’s system was developed seven years prior—in an effort to better understand both authors’ concepts:
Socializers (located in the quadrant delimited by the “player-oriented” and “interaction” poles) are those for whom the game is a social place that enables encounters. For them, gameplay is secondary and is often considered a pretext for social exchanges. Following Perron’s gamer/player distinction, since socializers give little importance to the goals of the game, they are mostly players.
Killers (in the “player-oriented” and “action” quadrant) are those who find pleasure in imposing their views on others to the point of harassment, even going as far as to kill them. While the in-game actions taken by players located in the “player-oriented” and “action” quadrant aren’t necessarily reducible to “killing” other players or to other “bad” behavior, Bartle’s typology, based on his own observations and interviews in the MUD community, labels them as “killers.” By their attitude, centered on clearly-defined goals that may or may not be those put forward by the game, they can be seen as either gamers or gameplayers.
Achievers (in the “world-oriented” and “action” quadrant) work their way through the game in order to gain power levels and accomplish the game’s objectives. For those reasons, they are mostly gamers, and even potential gameplayers, if they are looking for ways to exploit the game’s rules.
Explorers (in the “world-oriented” and “interaction” quadrant) are those who are constantly looking to discover more of what the game has to offer. If the explorers focus mostly on spatial exploration, they could be players or gamers; if they focus mostly on exploring the game’s functionalities as intended by the game designers, they are best described as gamers; lastly, if they explore functionalities that were not intended by the game designers (such as bugs), they are mostly gameplayers.
Other typologies follow Bartle’s own, often comparing themselves to it, but also sometimes criticizing it. Nevertheless, Bartle’s research is still considered pioneering work and has influenced, directly or indirectly, many scholars who have proposed their own taxonomies. For instance, in their empirical study, Schuurman et al. (2008) outlined eleven game motivations that lead to the identification of four player profiles: (1) the overall convinced gamer (“highly motivated to play video games … considers gaming as part of his or her identity”); (2) the convinced competitive gamer (“also highly motivated …[c]ompetition with others and challenging oneself are the main drivers for this cluster”); (3) the escapist gamer (“scores high on escapist motivations like being someone else, exploring new worlds and enjoying the freedom a game offers”); and (4) the pass-time [sic] gamer (“considers gaming to be a nice way to spend some time, but has no other outspoken motivations for playing video games”) (p. 49). Individuals that fit in the first two categories would be gamers that may occasionally be gameplayers, and those from the last two would most likely be players.
While typologies and other categorizations are mostly born from academic activities, let us not forget that the results of this classification work can be used by industry stakeholders—and even specifically commissioned by them—in order to better understand and target their user base. One such applied schema was proposed by Parks Associates (2006), a market research and consulting firm, who identified six types of players: (1) power gamers (who could be gamers or gameplayers); (2) social gamers (who “enjoy gaming as a way to interact with friends”—mostly players); (3) leisure gamers (who “mainly plays casual titles”—mostly players, though they could also be gamers); (4) dormant gamers (who “love gaming but spend little time because of family, work, or school”—who could be either players, gamers, or gameplayers); (5) incidental gamers (who “play games mainly out of boredom”—players); and (6) occasional gamers (who “play puzzle, word, and board games almost exclusively”—players).
Casual or Hardcore?
While previous codifying efforts have tried to depict the inner workings of video game users, and while each went to great lengths to suggest new, intricate, and detailed ways of thinking about video games and the people who play them, we can’t avoid addressing what may be the most common classifications of players, a dichotomy widely used by the (specialized) press and players alike: that of casual players and hardcore players. Jesper Juul (2010) aptly summarizes the stereotypical conventions associated with each kind, with such statements as “has a preference for positive and pleasant fictions” and “dislikes difficult games” to describe casual players, and “has played a large number of video games” and “will invest large amounts of time and resources toward playing video games” to qualify the hardcore players (p. 29). Still, Juul goes beyond the stereotypes and, rather than assigning positions to players on a continuum from “casual” to “hardcore,” he identifies four traits exhibited by players: fiction preference (from “Positive” to “Negative”); game knowledge (from “Low” to “High”); time investment (from “Low” to “High”); and attitude toward difficulty (from “Dislikes” to “Prefers”). Among his findings following interviews with game designers and players, Juul notes that, contrary to popular beliefs, casual players are a much more diverse crowd in terms of game knowledge and willingness to invest time in their gaming activities, and that they do enjoy games that provide a good challenge relative to their skill level.
Taking Games Seriously: From Cyber-Athletes to Game Scholars
There are three particular types of players that are difficult to fit into the categories previously discussed, but which are still important to consider: cyber-athletes, the players of serious games, and the playing analysts.
It would be inaccurate to call the participants of the first video game competitions “cyber-athletes,” but video game competitions have been promoted by the industry at least since the 1980s’ Atari-sponsored Space Invaders Tournament. Competitive playing enjoyed great popularity among PC users during the 1990s with first-person shooters such as DOOM (id Software, 1993), DOOM II (id Software, 1994), and Quake (id Software, 1996), but also real-time strategy games such as those of the Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment, 1994–2002) and StarCraft (Blizzard Entertainment, 1998–2010) franchises played competitively over modem connections or at LAN (local area network) parties. Today, competitive gaming is a profession in some countries: in South Korea, for example, superstar gamers are treated with great respect, equal to that afforded to famous practitioners of more physical and spatial sports. Cyber-athletes resist Bartle’s taxonomy because the games they play have little or no social components (though some games are played in teams and each player can have a definite role in the competition). As for Perron’s categories, cyber-athletes certainly aren’t players: they are gamers pushed to the extremes of the definition since their only goal is to win the game. In order to achieve that goal, cyber-athletes must nonetheless display the attitude of gameplayers: the cyber-athletes sustain no illusion and must be able to know and understand the limits not only of the programmed rules of the game, but also of the enforced rules in the competition itself. In every aspect of their gaming activities—from training to the actual competitions—cyber-athletes have to take the game seriously (for an in-depth look into the emergence of competitive gaming, see Taylor, 2012).
The term “serious games,” which was coined by Ben Sawyer (2002, cited in Breuer & Bente, 2010), is an umbrella term that now includes political games, social games, educational games, and training games. The very use of the term “serious games” isn’t without its challenges, because different authors use it to refer only to one or two types of games along the political/social/educational/training realm of possibilities. Adding to this difficulty is the fact that linking together words such as “serious” and “games” can result, depending on what definition of those words people are operating under, in an oxymoron or a tautology (Breuer & Bente, 2010). As for educational and training game players themselves, they are placed in an empowering situation, whereby they learn skills to be used at the computer (for example, when practicing on very mundane typing games) or outside of it (for example, when being put through very specialized military training simulations). Political and social games, however, sometimes rob users of their power over the game world: by disempowering users, political and social games can better demonstrate that a real-life situation can be unwinnable. Serious games are both a growing market, and an increasingly common subject for academic research (Breuer & Bente, 2010).
Playing analysts are mostly journalists in the video game field and scholars who tackle video games for academic purposes. Espen Aarseth (2003) says of playing analysts that they aren’t like other types of players, and that they challenge classic typologies because they can borrow from any roles proposed by Bartle by engaging with the games on different levels. Aarseth thus proposes seven “strata of engagement” of playing analysts to identify how “deep” their play is: superficial play, light play, partial completion, total completion, repeated play, expert play, and innovative play. These strata may look like they form a gradual curve from the players to the gameplayers, but even in a state of superficial or light play, playing analysts remain meta-players who are (somehow) conscious that they are playing a game, even going as far as monitoring themselves by recording game sessions for academic purposes or by taking notes on their playing behavior.
With the increasing diversity of video games (and of ways to engage them) also comes a diversity of ways to categorize video game users. Without trying to deprive users of the power to refer to themselves as they see fit, it is the video game scholar’s responsibility to take a step back in order to see the bigger picture. Categories and typologies of video game users are abundant and come from various types of people: journalists, scholars, game designers, research firms, and, of course, players themselves. While we may not know what the future holds, it is a safe bet that new ways of playing will emerge in the coming years, and, with them, new ways of thinking about what “playing”—and “player”—mean.
References
Aarseth, E. (2003). Playing research: Methodological approaches to game analysis. Game Approaches Conference, August 28–29.
Bartle, R. (1996). Hearts, clubs, diamonds, spades: Players who suit MUDs. Retrieved December 5, 2012, from www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm.
Breuer, J. & Bente, G. (2010). Why so serious? On the relation of serious games and learning. Eludamos. Journal for Computer Game Culture, 4(1). Retrieved December 5, 2012, from www.eludamos.org/index.php/eludamos/article/viewArticle/vol4no1-2.
Caillois, R. (2006). The definition of play and The classification of games. In K. Salen & E. Zimmerman (Eds.), The game design reader: A rules of play anthology (pp. 122–155). Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press.
Huizinga, J. ([1938] 1955). Homo ludens: A study of the play-element in culture. Boston: The Beacon Press.
Juul, J. (2010). A casual revolution: Reinventing video games and their players. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Parks Associates. (2006). Survey reveals U.S. gamers market is diversifying. Press release.
Perron, B. (2003). From gamers to players to gameplayers: The example of interactive movies. In M. J. P. Wolf and B. Perron (Eds.), The video game theory reader (pp. 237–258). New York and London: Routledge.
Sawyer, B. (2002). Serious games: Improving public policy through game-based learning and simulation. Retrieved December 5, 2012, from www.seriousgames.org/images/seriousarticle.pdf.
Schuurman, D., De Moor, K., De Marez, L., & Van Looy, J. (2008). Fanboys, competers, escapists and timekillers: A typology based on gamers’ motivations for playing video games. Proceedings of the 3rd ACM International Conference on Digital Interactive Media in Entertainment and Art.
Suits, B. (1978). The grasshopper: Games, life and utopia. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Suits, B. (2006). Construction of a definition. In K. Salen & E. Zimmerman (Eds.), The game design reader: A rules of play anthology (pp. 172–191). Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press.
Taylor, T. L. (2012). Raising the stakes: E-sports and the professionalization of computer gaming. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.