Player Personas and Why They Are Important

What is a Player Persona?

A player persona is a tool for designing a game for your target audience. You picture one imaginary player, the type of player your game is for, and design the game for them. That is why a player persona is also called a player type, a gamer persona or a gaming persona.

As a quick example, let’s imagine you are using a player persona called Dave, who likes mid-to-heavy-weight, strategic games, with their top five games on BGG being: Twilight Imperium, Scythe, Root, War of the Ring, and Kingdom Death Monster.

From creating this player persona, you can identify the target audience’s preferences in both design and art, as well as price point in most circumstances.

Player Types: Does One Persona Cover Them All?

Player types (also called types of gamers or player archetypes) are groups of players sorted by what they enjoy most in a game. The best-known model is the Bartle player types: four types Richard Bartle described in 1996 for online games, still used across game design:

• Achievers want to win, score points and make progress.
• Explorers want to discover how the game works and what it hides.
• Socializers play for the time with other players.
• Killers enjoy acting against other players. In board games, that means direct conflict and “take that” moves.

Board game players can also be split more simply. In our Board Game Design 101 video on player personas, we compare a hobby gamer, who plays longer games to feel clever, with a social gamer, who wants a 15 to 30 minute game with friends.

Does one player persona cover all player types? No. Real players are a mix of types, and no game pleases every type at once. A persona does something more useful: it combines the player types that matter most for your game into one person you can design for. Dave, below, is mostly an achiever who also enjoys conflict. Harry is closer to a social gamer. Each one gives you a clear picture of who your game is for, so you can decide what to leave out.

How to Make a Player Persona

There are a few ways to start. I find it works well to prototype a concept you feel passionate about first, and then work out the natural player persona for it. That persona then guides you through the rest of development.

It is also fine to outline a player persona first, before you have a concept. You have fewer limits this way, so start from what you know about board games and the general preferences of your target audience.

For example, say you pick a player persona who likes replayability. You can then use BGG to find games that have elements such as dice and randomness. From there you can build up your player persona and their preferences.

Designing With Player Personas

Using Dave as an example from earlier, even with just a brief search on BGG, we can outline his core mechanic preferences.

• Combat/PVP

• Engine Building

• Territory/Area Control

Additionally, with more research and playthroughs of the games listed in Dave’s top 5, we can outline key actions/emotions we want players to experience in our game.

• A sense of progression through building an engine and improving your actions each turn

• Meaningful decisions that directly affect yourself and your opponents

• A sense of growth of influence over other players

Even this quick overview of Dave helps us shape our concept, or adjust an existing game to suit our target market better.

Player Persona-Driven Artwork and Graphics

Let us shift to a different player persona that we will quickly outline.

Harry’s top three games on BGG are:

• Exploding Kittens

• Unstable Unicorns

• The Binding of Isaac: Four Souls

Just focusing on the artwork/graphics, we can see that Harry prefers his games to have:

• Vibrant colors

• Cute/simple characters with easily identifiable characteristics

• Iconography over text for key information, but text to help with explaining more complex actions.

If we are designing a game for a target market similar to that of Exploding Kittens or Unstable Unicorns, but we are not catering to the preferences of Harry, our player persona, then making changes to the art and graphics could help bridge that gap.

Setting the Price Point With a Player Persona

The board game sector is by far the easiest out of all the gaming sectors to use player persona preferences as a guide for price point. This is because more often than not, mechanics and artwork directly link to weight, which directly links to price.

Returning to our player persona of Dave, who liked games like Scythe and Root, we can quickly see that our price point should be between the $50-70 range. There are of course outliers like Twilight Imperium, but it should be pretty obvious whether or not your game falls into a similar sort of price range.

At this point it is prudent to also compare your game with the player persona’s top five and see whether or not the tangible value is similar. If all the player persona’s top 5 have miniatures, and your game does not, this could impact the parity in value in a negative way. This isn’t to say that you must add miniatures in order for your game to have the same value as these other games, but it is worth considering whether miniatures (in this example) are key to that value proposition for your target audience.

A persona keeps helping after the design stage. It shapes who you market to, as our guide to identifying your game’s target audience explains, and it is the first step in getting your game to the table.