Returning Again to My Gamer Profile

I have done the gamer motivation profile thing over at Quadratic Foundry a few times at this point.  It is one of those things that comes up every now and then, often part of something like Blaugust.  So you can read about my past runs… and how they differ every time… if you so desire.

• May 2020 – A Flawed Profile in Gamer Motivation
• Aug 2019 – My Gamer Motivation Profile Once Again
• Jun 2015 – Who Says I am Calm, Spontaneous, and Grounded?

However, I received an email from them last week that said they had something new for their profiles now.  They now have an array of nine gamer types to go up against Bartle’s now ancient array of Explorer, Socializer, Achiever, and Killer quadrants.  They are:

The Nine Gamers to oppose the Nine Riders

They are, if you cannot read the chart:

• Acrobat
• Gardener
• Slayer
• Skirmisher
• Gladiator
• Ninja
• Bounty Hunter
• Architect
• Bard

You can read about them in detail over on the page that describes them.

So naturally I wanted to see which type I was.  That meant going back and running through the quiz again, which is always the largest flaw in such and enterprise.  As I have said numerous times, the questions are a bit… squishy.  What I deem important can change depending upon the game or situation.  And, as such, my profile changes every time I re-do the quiz, as it did this time.

If you have an account, as I do, when you re-take the quiz you get to see your previous answers and the fact that I end up changing at least half of them every time is a pretty good indication that the question don’t have hard and fast answers.  At least not for me.

So I am apparently and Architect/Skirmisher this time around.

I am at war with myself

• Architects are solo gamers that enjoy planning, decision-making, and progression. They prefer slow-paced, relaxing gameplay where they can plan and build something grand and enduring.

I guess.  Certainly that describes my Minecraft style.

• Skirmishers want fast-paced team arenas that are accessible and easy to jump into. They are highly spontaneous gamers who dislike games that require thinking and planning.

And that sounds like the polar opposite of architect.  So I like relaxed solo, fast paced team games, and I enjoy planning but dislike thinking and planning.  I am also a by the book cop who is a loose cannon who breaks all the rules or something.

My adjectives this time around were: Aggressive, Spontaneous, Driven, Gregarious, and Immersed.

That is kind of a lot, while my graph, which I have posted with each of these was:

Where my motivations lay

And, as usual, once you have the profile the site tries to recommend games.  My top ten matches (for PC and Nintendo Switch) were:

1. Animal Crossing (series)
2. Starbound
3. Diablo (series)
4. No Man’s Sky
5. Stardew Valley
6. Elite: Dangerous
7. The Sims 3
8. ARK: Survival Evolved
9. Fallout Shelter
10. Borderlands (series)

I own games from half that list, but never really got into them save for Diablo.  The first game I have really invested time in on the list is Minecraft, which made it on page three of the recommendations.

Of course, judging from the Massively OP post where they did their surveys, an MMO player needs to be a Bard.  If I read the description for Bard, that sounds a bit like me too.  Maybe less on the social interaction, but certainly the bit about being a part of a grand story.  So I probably answered the questions badly yet again.  But if you go back and take the quiz knowing what you want the result to be, is it any more or less valid?

I went back and changed very little… slightly more emphasis on one thing, a little less on others, but no answer moved by more than one position… and ended up with Bard/Bounty Hunter.

Bard yes, but a Bounty Hunter?

• Bards are team players who want to chat and interact with other players in game worlds that are rich with lore, stories, discovery, and customization. For them, the game is a grand story that emerges from a community of players.

That is sort of me.  I am less of a chatter and more interested in interacting with the world.  Being part of a grand story that emerges from a community of players pretty much pegs why I play EVE Online the way I do, but not WoW or many other MMORPGs… largely because the grand story is scripted and has little or nothing to do with the community of players in those games.

• Bounty Hunters are solo, action-oriented explorers who want game worlds that they can make their own through customization and discovery. They also enjoy power progression and unleashing mayhem.

I think the questions about explosives and being an agent of chaos are more influential than one might suspect.  That is the only thing I can imagine would get me on the Bounty Hunter type.  I am not really at “action oriented” explorer by my own measure.  Look how low my action score is both times.

At the root those small changes altered my motivations a lot more significantly than I would have guessed.

Are my motivations a lie?

You can see my current profile in detail here.

With the change of profile, my game recommendations changed… a bit.

1. City of Heroes
2. Slime Rancher
3. Animal Crossing (series)
4. Star Wars: The Old Republic
5. The Elder Scrolls Online
6. Fallout Shelter
7. The Sims 3
8. Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn
9. The Elder Scrolls (series)
10. Dragon Age (series)

I guess I should be happy some MMORPGs made the first page this time, though I have to question City of Heroes being a recommendation.  You cannot legally play it currently, as it is only available via private/pirate servers.  Also, like the other MMORPGs that made the top ten, it was never a game I could get into really.  Not my thing.  And, of course, WoW and EVE Online appear nowhere on either recommendation list.

So there we go.  Am I what the first pass through the quiz said I was or the second?  Should I go take it again until it gets me right?

A Flawed Profile in Gamer Motivation

Another set of shared posts started in the Blapril Discord channel around the Nick Yee/Quadratic Foundry gamer motivation profile quiz, and I was going to simply give it a pass.  After all, I had done that back in 2015 and then again as part of Blaugust last year.

But then I read the post from Bhagpuss on the whole thing and decided that I needed to take the quiz again right then and there if only to prove a point or two.  So I opened up a fresh Chrome session in privacy mode and ran off to take the quiz.  I already have a profile there but didn’t want to be tainted by anything I had done in the past.

One quiz later and the results were mine.  I am “Aggressive, Spontaneous, Gregarious, and Grounded” according to my answers.

My profile summary graph – May 2020

Just eight months back during Blaugust I was “Calm, Driven, Gregarious, and Grounded,” and had this chart.

My profile summary graph – August 2019

And about four years earlier, back in June 2015, I was “Calm, Spontaneous, and Grounded,” according to my answers, with the following graph.

My profile summary graph – June 2015

I guess there is a common theme in “grounded,” though that may be due to wearing a static strap while taking the quiz.  You cannot be too careful!

So what is going on here?  Is the quiz garbage?  Am I a liar, and an inconsistent one at that?

Maybe some of both?

That the quiz is garbage isn’t a hill I am willing to die on.  But I will stick with the idea that the quiz, like much in the realm of the social sciences, is trying to measure complex things via simple parameters.

And while I am demonstrably an unreliable narrator when I speak of my own motivations, I would contend that is because said motivations are not simple, but are often complicated, interdependent, and contextual.

So when I get a question like this about story absent any sort of context, there isn’t really any clear choice.

How important is this to me?

In a lot of games it isn’t important, or it is something that is organic to the game and develops over time.  There isn’t a whole lot of story in RimWorld or Civilzation V or Minecraft other than what you make.

In other games, like EverQuest II, there is a lot of rich story going on that I tend to skip pass.  I am at the quest giver saying, “Cool story bro, but just tell me who you need killed already.”  I honestly cannot tell you any of the big story arcs for any of the expansions in any but the most simple terms, if at all.

I am a little better in World of Warcraft, where I can at least tell you the major plot line of most of the expansions, but I still tend to read the quest objectives on the way rather than listening to any NPC tales.  Just give me the damn quest Anduin!

But in a game like Diablo III I am all about the story, which is part of why the post story seasons don’t do much for me.  Slaughter and levels upon levels and piles of gold don’t mean much as the context in which the really mattered has passed.

So if I am playing a Civ game, it is not important, if I am playing Diablo III it is extremely important, and if I am playing WoW or LOTRO is is somewhat important.  So what is my answer supposed to be then?  As with a lot of questions I went for the middle ground, which you can interpret as a shoulder shrug and append the phrase, “I guess” to the end.

And that is how I felt about a lot of the quiz.  Absent the anchor of a specific situation, my answer is always going to feel uncertain.  It is like asking me how important strawberries are to me.  I like strawberries, and they seem essential if we’re talking about a strawberry shortcake or strawberries and cream, but maybe less so if we’re talking about nuclear proliferation or civil rights.

It is thus easy to argue yourself into the position that everything on the list is not important at all.  Nobody is going to die if the storyline of your game is insufficiently elaborate.

Without context the questions are meaningless, and the quiz is no fun if you you just wet blanket the whole thing, so what happens to me is that I start to think of context where the thing in question is more or less important to me.

But those are all thoughts of the moment, and if I took the quiz in another two weeks I bet I would come up with a different set of contexts that would alter my answers.  I took the quiz less than an hour ago and, as an example, I cannot remember what came to my mine around this question regarding being an agent of chaos.

Not an Agent of KAOS

Right now I can come up with context that get me to any of the response options, but I cannot even recall the answer I gave, which at least implies I did not weigh it heavily.  It was very much in the moment.  And given that the only common thread in my three results is being “grounded,” which sounds like the opposite of being an agent of chaos, I almost feel like there should be a slider for how serious an answer should be taken.

I think the only thing I picked as extremely important was about explosions and blowing things up, which was probably my most visceral response.  But I don’t know how much of an indicator it really is.  Blowing things up for me tends to apply mostly to EVE Online or maybe Minecraft when I have some dynamite.

At the end of the quiz, once you get your score, you can then go to the game recommendations page.  My theory is that if you have answered all the questions correctly… yeah, what does that even mean… the recommendation results should include at least a few games you know and like in the top results.  According to the site, the results are based on the favorite games of the 1,000 people whose answers were closest to your own, so it gets around the whole “is the quiz even valid” and gets straight to “garbage in, garbage out” for results.

For the last two sets of answers I got the following recommendations:

Balanced (2020 / 2019):

1. Elite: Dangerous / No Man’s Sky
2. Borderlands 3 / FTL: Faster Than Light
3. Factorio / ARK: Survival Evolved
4. Subnautica / Factorio
5. Fallout Shelter / Cities: Skylines
6. Kerbal Space Program / Subnautica
7. Portal (series) / Terraria
8. Civilization (series) / Portal (series)
9. Rise of the Tomb Raider / RuneScape
10. Half-Life 2 / The Sims (series)

Not completely off the mark I suppose.  I own a bunch of those games, and certainly Civilization would make the cut and I guess RuneScape is an MMORPG, but there is nothing on the list I am playing a lot of lately.

“Balanced” refers to the relative popularity of a given title in people’s lists overall.  You can also see just “Popular” games or you can open it up to “Niche” games.  Going with “Popular” makes the list less likely for me. The Fallout series dominates as individual titles.

Going with “Niche” does get my Lord of the Rings Online on one list, and RimWorld makes the other, but it puts Cookie Clicker at the top of one of them and WTF is that doing on any list of mine?

Now I am curious to know what answers would get me to EVE Online or World of Warcraft as a top ten recommendation, even in the “Niche” category.  I want to reverse engineer this, to figure out which buttons I need to click to get an answer that matches a game I am currently playing and then evaluate whether those answers really fit me, even if it is only in the context of a specific game.

All of which seems to make this quiz and its results a good conversation piece or a starting point for some self-reflection, but it doesn’t seem to provide anything that one might qualify as a solid answer

Anyway, if you want to see the results and responses from other bloggers, Jeromai over at Why I Game has the list of links you are looking for.

Quadratic Foundry Character Name Generator

In the grand tradition of the old WoW Guild Name Generator from Nick Yee, his organization, Quadratic Foundry, has created a Character Name Generator.

Rather than being completely random, the generator lets you specify a starting letter, an ending letter, or a string of letters you would like the name to contain.

Starts with ‘W’ and ends with ‘M’ gets you…

And it even gives you variants on the name with special characters if you simply must have a specific name but find that it has already been taken.

As with the WoW Guild Name Generator, the core of this was based on previous research done on World of Warcraft and the names harvested as part of that.

Anyway, if you’re stuck for a name you now have a new place to try.