A New Taxonomy of Gamers: Case Study: Metroid Prime 3: Corruption

This is the sixth in an 11-part series. To start from the beginning, read part one: "What We Talk About When We Talk About Games." Or read the previous post, "Skill Players: Drilling Down."

Metroid Prime 3: Corruption would seem, on paper, to have something for the three types of gamers we've identified so far. For the Tourist, there are imaginative worlds to traverse and dramatic narrative moments linking a galactic conspiracy. For the Perfectionist, there are tough boss battles and difficult puzzles. For the Completist, there's a wealth of hidden treasures to discover and secret areas to explore. It sounds like there's something for everyone. But let's go back to that quote from Penny Arcade's Gabe:

Tycho talked about the different reasons people play games ... I remember it came up while we were both playing Metroid Prime: Corruption. I was talking to him about how I was getting frustrated because some of the boss battles were really giving me a hard time. I realised I don't play games for the challenge. I don't need or want to be punished by a game for making mistakes. I play games for what Ron Gilbert calls "new art". I play to see the next level or cool animation. I don't play games to beat them I play games to see them.

Gabe is a Tourist, which shouldn't ipso facto preclude him from enjoying a game that rewards Skill Players. Indeed, Metroid Prime 3 seems like a better candidate than most to satisfy gamers of all types. Judging by its Metacritic score, you could say it did.

Hold on a second. We've already said that these categories aren't mutually exclusive. A critic seems more likely than your average gamer to exhibit traits from across the spectrum, thanks to his obvious passion and extensive experience with all types of games. When somebody raves about Metroid Prime 3, it's because they responded in more than one way to it. They enjoyed it as a Tourist and as a Skill Player.

In that case, the question is why Gabe's Tourist tendencies were unsatisfied by a game that clearly possesses many of the qualities a Tourist looks for. The reason is that the elements in Metroid Prime 3 that Gabe responds to were not unified with those he doesn't. As we saw in the Guitar Hero analysis, the way to do this successfully is to associate more than one kind of feedback with a single action. Metroid Prime 3 doesn't do that. Rather than cohering the Tourist, Completist, and Perfectionist aspects, it keeps them separate.

Here's an example. Early in the game, you're told that you've received a signal from a particular location in Skytown. Samus hops out of her ship to see a whole new environment and with a specific and definable goal: reach the location of the beacon. This is a Tourist moment, but one that doesn't put off either of the Skill Players.

As she makes her way across the level, she blasts at some wimpy foes, which disappoints the Perfectionist. Very little is involved in fighting the grunts of Metroid, as most are complete chumps. It's simply not challenging to move from one place to another.

Finally, Samus reaches her destination, only to be told that she is missing a specific upgrade necessary to continue. To the Tourist, this is like turning down a dead-end street on the way to the Eiffel Tower. Why would the game direct you to a place where you couldn't do anything? In this five-minute span, the game has managed to alienate Tourists and Perfectionists. Only a predominantly Completist gamer wouldn't notice the missteps.

(It's important to note that this wasn't a case of the player simply exploring and bumping up against an invisible wall. The game explicitly instructs the player to go to that far-flung location for the purpose of demonstrating that the player needs a new power-up.)

There are numerous other examples. Obviously a Tourist like Gabe found it jarring to contend with the boss battles. And indeed, the boss battles are repetitive and difficult, nearly all featuring some variation on the "shoot the glowing weak spot" strategy, as well as pattern-based enemy attacks. The bosses are usually just guardians of power-ups; few are germane to the storyline. For Perfectionists, this is ideal -- but they have to wade through long stretches of unchallenging gameplay and a fairly intricate storyline in order to find what they want. Both Tourists and Perfectionists would likely be put off by the game's endless tangents and backtracking.

As for Completists, there's a lot here for them to like: tons of hidden upgrades, and a giant map to fill in. If someone's primary motivation for playing games comes from the Completist point of view, then I suspect that's the true cause of Metroid Prime 3's critical success, particularly if those Completists also harbor Perfectionist or Tourist tendencies.

That's the key: if a player fits more squarely in one category than another, than that will necessarily color his perception of the game. And it explains why a Tourist with Completist tendencies will feel put off by Metroid Prime 3, without even realizing why, whereas a Completist with Perfectionist or Tourist tendencies will probably love it. (For an example of the former, read my original review.)

Notice that we have not made any judgment here as to whether Metroid Prime 3 is "good" or "bad." Those terms are irrelevant! We're critiquing the game by identifying the desires it satisfies, or fails to satisfy, wholly in terms of our new gamer taxonomy. We're creating an unambiguous vocabulary for talking about games that applies across genres and transcends the vague notion of "hardcore" versus "casual." This method of evaluating games is starting to look much more robust and useful than a ten-point ratings scale.

Unfortunately, we're still missing a big piece of the puzzle. And it's got nothing to do with Skill Players and Tourists.

Next: Cash Rules Everything Around Me

A New Taxonomy of Gamers: Skill Players: Drilling Down

This is the fifth in an 11-part series. To start from the beginning, read part one: "What We Talk About When We Talk About Games." Or read the previous post, "Case Study: Guitar Hero."

We've established that Skill Players are concerned primarily with mastery of the game rather than enjoying the stops along the way. Their idea of "beating" a game is to pound it into submission. But this can mean different things depending on the game and on one's inclinations. It may be that Skill Players themselves, while broadly similar, have different motivations for playing games, and can be further classified into two more similar but distinct groups: Completists and Perfectionists.

A Completist may be less interested in maximizing his ability to play a game, and more interested in making sure he doesn't miss anything. Certainly you wouldn't say it takes skill per se to locate all the packages in Grand Theft Auto III, or all the agility orbs in Crackdown. It takes patience and determination. And while the game does offer incentives to do these things, in both cases they're non-essential to the task of beating the game in the traditional sense. The reward is having no mountains left to climb.

Compare this to the Tourist, who may find packages along the way and appreciate the financial reward, or who grabs agility orbs as a necessary part of gameplay, but won't take the time to find that 500th one. In the case of Crackdown, there is no quantifiable difference in your character's jumping ability between the 499th and 500th agility orb. It does not help you complete the missions to acquire every single one, but it does net you achievement points. The reason a Completist falls under the Skill Player heading is because his concern is not with surrending to the rules of the game world, but instead with asserting his dominance over them.

A typical Perfectionist is the classic high-score freak. Billy Mitchell and Steve Wiebe come to mind. They don't care about rescuing the princess; they care about proving who's the best Donkey Kong player. Donkey Kong himself is not the antagonist to these players. The scoreboard is. Other players are. There's a reason the only people still playing Donkey Kong are Perfectionists. A Completist would just need to make it to the kill screen once. A Tourist would probably do a cost-benefit analysis of rescuing the princess and move on to a different game.

Bottom line: the Perfectionist sees success as relative to the performance of others. In a sense, the last-place player in a Halo match could be said to have finished the game. But for the Perfectionist in him, it sure doesn't feel that way. Other examples of the Perfectionist style might be trying to get all "S" rankings in Devil May Cry, or playing through Ninja Gaiden Black on the hardest difficulty. In both cases, the appeal is in accomplishing something that only a select few ever will.

As with the earlier Guitar Hero example, which described how Skill Players and Tourists may differ in their approach to performing the same task, we may see situations where the Completist and the Perfectionist seem to be doing the same thing. Consider somebody who earns all 1,000 achievement points in an Xbox 360 game. For the Completist, there's no surer sign that he's completed everything there is to complete. There are no more worlds to conquer. For the Perfectionist, it means he has earned the highest possible score -- a perfect score. The biggest difference is that this likely means the Completist has, for all intents and purposes, finished his experience with the game. We can't infer the same thing about the Perfectionist unless we have more information.

Earlier we looked at how Guitar Hero was able to appeal to Skill Players and Tourists equally. Now that we've split Skill Players into two sub-groups, while leaving the Tourist group as it is, it's time to consider a different scenario. What happens when a game contains discrete elements that appeal to all three types of gamers, but those elements work in discordance with each other? Can we use these terms as a window into why a well-made, premium console game might still seem off -- why it might not work on a gut level? And can we isolate those traits in a single game that appeal separately to Completists, Perfectionists, and Tourists?

We sure can.

Next: Case Study: Metroid Prime 3: Corruption