Abstract
Game designers attempt to ignite affective, emotional responses from players via engineering game designs to incite definite user experiences. Theories of emotion state that definite emotional responses are individual, and caused by the individual interaction sequence or history. Engendering desired emotions in the audience of traditional audiovisual media is a considerable challenge; however it is potentially even more difficult to achieve the same goal for the audience of interactive entertainment, because a substantial degree of control rests in the hand of the end user rather than the designer. This paper presents a possible solution to the challenge of integrating the user in the design of interactive entertainment such as computer games by employing the "persona" framework introduced by Alan Cooper. This approach is already in use in interaction design. The method can be improved by complementing the traditional narrative description of personas with quantitative, data-oriented models of predicted patterns of user behaviour for a specific computer game Additionally, persona constructs can be applied both as design-oriented metaphors during the development of games, and as analytical lenses to existing games, e.g. for evaluation of patterns of player behaviour.
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Chapman, C.N., Milham, R.: The personas’ new clothes: methodological and practical arguments against a popular method. In: Proceedings of Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 50th Annual Meeting, pp. 634–636 (2006)
Cooper, A.: The Inmates Are Running the Asylum. SAMS Publishing, Indianapolis (2004)
Cooper, A., Reimann, R., Cronin, D.: About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design. Wiley Publishing, Indianapolis (2007)
Damasio, A.: Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. Penguin, London (2005)
Davis, J., Steury, K., Pagulayan, R.: A survey method for assessing perceptions of a game: The consumer playtest in game design. Game Studies: The International Journal of Computer Game Research 5 (2005)
Eco, U.: The Role of The Reader. Indiana university Press, Bloomington (1984)
Frijda, N.H.: The Laws of Emotion. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers, Mahwah (2007)
Goffman, E.: The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Penguin, London (1990)
Iser, W.: The Implied Reader. Johns Hopkins Paperback Editions, London (1978)
Kim, J.H., Gunn, D.V., Schuh, E., Phillips, B.C., Pagulayan, R.J., Wixon, D.: Tracking Real-Time User Experience (TRUE): A comprehensive instrumentation solution for complex systems. In: Proceedings of CHI, pp. 443–451 (2008)
Lazzaro, N.: Why We Play Games: Four Keys to More Emotion Without Story (2004), http://www.xeodesign.com/xeodesign_whyweplaygames.pdf
Mandryk, R.L., Inkpen, K.M., Calvert, T.W.: Using Psychophysiological Techniques to Measure User Experience with Entertainment Technologies. Behaviour & Information Technology 25(2), 141–158 (2006)
Medlock, M.C., Wixon, D., Terrano, M., Romero, R.L., Fulton, B.: Using the RITE method to improve products: A definition and a case study. In: Proceedings of UPA (2002)
Nacke, L., Lindley, C.A.: Flow and Immersion in First-Person Shooters: Measuring the player’s gameplay experience. In: Proceedings of the 2008 Conference on Future Play: Research, Play, Share, pp. 81–88 (2008)
Pagulayan, R.J., Keeker, K., Wixon, D., Romero, R.L., Fuller, T.: User-centered design in games. In: The human-computer interaction handbook: fundamentals, evolving technologies and emerging applications, pp. 883–906. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Philadelphia (2003)
Pine II, J.: Mass Customization: The New Frontier in Business Competition. Harvard Business Press (1992)
Ravaja, N., Saari, T., Laarni, J., Kallinen, K., Salminen, M., Holopainen, J., Järvinen, A.: The Psychophysiology of Video Gaming: Phasic Emotional Responses to Game Events. In: DiGRA conference Changing views: Worlds in play. Digital Games Research Association Press (2005)
Ravaja, N., Saari, T., Turpeinen, M., Laarni, J., Salminen, M., Kivikangas, M.: Spatial presence and emotions during video game playing: Does it matter with whom you play? Presence: Teleoperaters and Virtual Environments 15(4), 381–392 (2005)
Sanders, E.B.-N.: Scaffolds For Building Everyday Creativity, in Design for Effective Communications: Creating Contexts. Allworth Press, New York (2006)
Shils, E.A., Finch, E.A.: The methodology of the social sciences. Free Press, Glencoe (1997)
Swain, C.: Master Metrics: The Science Behind the Art of Game Design. Presentation at NLGD Conference, Utrecht, Holland (2008)
Tychsen, A., Canossa, A.: Defining Personas in Games Using Metrics. In: Proceedings of Future Play 2008, pp. 73–80 (2008)
Ó, Reilly, T.: What Is Web 2.0 - Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software, September 30 (2005), http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html
Goetz, P.: Too Many Clicks! Unit-Based Interfaces Considered Harmful. Gamasutra, August 23 (2006)
Hilbert, D.M., Redish, J.C.: A practical guide to usability testing. Intellect books, Bristol (1999)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2009 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing
About this paper
Cite this paper
Canossa, A., Drachen, A. (2009). Play-Personas: Behaviours and Belief Systems in User-Centred Game Design. In: Gross, T., et al. Human-Computer Interaction – INTERACT 2009. INTERACT 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5727. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-03658-3_55
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-03658-3_55
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-03657-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-03658-3
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)