Bill MacKenty

Why do people play computer games?

People play games for different reasons at different times.

Richard Bartle was one of the first to present a coherent theory about this -  the bartle test. Another researcher, Nick Yee questioned Bartles findings in his daedalus project.

Bartle initially started with 4 player types below:

Achievers
Explorers
Socializers
Killers

Bartle increased his graph to 8 types. He discusses these types at length in this article on his website :

source for above content.

Nick Yee had a different perspective than Bartle, and presented the following reasons play mmorpg’s source) :

I think people probably are generally one specific player type, but drift into other types as they play.