The Player Persona Template
As I´m reading and working on some projects related to Gamification I decided to make the Player Persona Template.
As you know, a User Persona is a representation of the goals and behavior of a hypothesized group of users. In most cases, personas are synthesized from data collected from interviews with users. … For each product, more than one persona is usually created, but one persona should always be the primary focus for the design.
What is the Player Persona? The Interaction Design Foundation: “The Player Persona is similar to a user persona (which most UX researchers will be intimately familiar with), but it also examines some gamification-specific elements which would not otherwise exist in a standard user persona”.
You can use Player Persona both in projects for the gaming industry or in Gamification projects.
What kind or gamer are you? Shall you take one of these tests to know it better?
Me for example: I´m a Explorer (Bartle test), Free Spirit (Gamified UK) and Creative (Archetypes quiz).
There are some gamer classifications by type. Bartle breaks up the way people play games into four simple categories. These categories are the Achiever, the Explorer, the Socializer, and the Killer. 80% of people are socializer, 10% for achievers, 10% for explorers and only 1% of killers.
This is the most relevant classification, there are others as the one of Keirsey at Gamasutra (“Personality and Play Styles”) or the one from Andrzej Marczewski.
For the archetypes, this is related to Jung, this graphic makes a good summary:
With this info, I though about making a Player Persona Template. It should have:
- A photo/drawing
- Name
- Quote or Statement
- Demographics data (gender, age, status, job title, industry, location, country)
- Personality traits (Extrover/Introvert, Sensing/Intuitive, Thinkig/Feeling, Judging/Receiving)
- Bio / Motivations / Goals / Pains
- Tech (use of Internet, Software, Social Media, Mobile, TV)
- Bartle Game type (Social, Achiever, Explorer, Killer)
- Archetype (Jung types or similar)
I made a sketching template for the player persona and then a template:
Player Persona Template
You can download it here both in Sketch and .png files.
Let´s make some examples, think of gamers for:
- Candy Crush
- Clash Royale
- Call of Duty
- Pokemon GO
Carmen — Candy Crush Player
Robert — Clash Royale Player
Victor — Call of Duty Player
Alison — PokemonGO Player
This should help you to define your player persona. Then you can move to Customer Journey for example.
More info:
- Nielsen Norman Group — Personas
- Bartle taxonomy of player types
- Marczewski’s Player and User Types Hexad
- Gamification at work: Designing engaging business software
- Jungian archetypes and The 12 common archetypes
- UX Canvas Compilation
- Gamification on Pinterest
