A team of multidisciplinary researchers at the University of Waterloo has identified three basic video game player traits that will help to make game design more personalized and more effectively motivate gamers in both entertainment and work applications.
Gustavo Fortes Tondello, a PhD candidate at Waterloo who co-authored the study with Lennart Nacke, an associate professor and director of the Human-Computer Interaction Games Group at Waterloo’s Games Institute, has been developing a more definitive player traits model that gives scores for different preferences. The model generates scores for three different traits, including the degree to which players prefer action elements, aesthetic aspects, or goal orientation in games. Identifying traits makes it possible to analyze player preferences for different groups of people, including different age ranges or genders. Read the full story.