Some thoughts about preferences in game design

Every single person reacts to the game in a different way and even quite similar in tastes gamers can like or dislike your game design. On the GameCrafts conference in Kiev was an interesting speech about human's personality influence on the preferences and derision in games. Here is the link
What is is your opinion about it and does it really meter on the prototype stage of the game design?

 

It would be nice if you gave a summary of what he said, instead of expecting us to go watch a 30 minute video.

I don't feel I can contribute meaningfully to this thread without some understanding of what you're referencing. Once I do know about it, I'd love to discuss this.

 

I plan to watch it later. Looks interesting. A short summary would be nice if you want a meaningful discussion.

 

Have to say, "I've read lots of Youtube comments" doesn't exactly give me the best confidence in this guy's arguments.

And the "quotes" at the bottom of the guy's website are idiocy that will probably attract legal attention.

And this guy claims to have written "dozens" of research papers, but googling "john uke research papers" turns up absolutely nothing and googling "john uke personality research papers" turns up one really strange site--that has no papers.

1:20 into the video so far. This guy seems legit.

He says that "a ton" of developers came up with these types of fun. I really appreciate him sourcing this and mentioning these developers. Because if he didn't, it would seem like he was just making stuff up. That said, most of them seem relatively straightforward. But it seems like there's a fair amount of overlap. For example, what he calls "expression" seems like a variant on "roleplay."

The "Artisans" category is humorous. First person shooters, sports games, and tabletop games. That makes sense.

He mentions that "the top 1% of companies get 99% of the sales." This is not abnormal. It follows a power distribution just like world wealth (1% of individuals control the overwhelming majority of world wealth).

Amusing that he claims Bartle's taxonomy is not very scientific, while he's using an enneagram...

Did he just say that people who like monopoly are the same people who play sports games? That's certainly an...interesting claim.

I strongly disagree with his claim that these types of fun are why people play the games they play. I play strategy games, RPGs, sims, visual novels, character action games, puzzle and walking sim games, racing games, general adventure games...while there's value to the framework, it's simply something more to consider.

And that's how I'd judge (am I being too harsh?) the whole talk. Regardless of the quality of the claims, player types are certainly something to consider. Something to think about if one is considering making multiple games of drastically different type yet that are intended to be played by the same group of players.


Edit: sorry, I completely forgot to consider your question about this affecting prototypes. In all honesty, we likely already do something like this subconsciously, by simply assessing whether things fit into our theme or "essential experience," to quote TonyLi quoting Jessie Schell.