{"id":31897,"date":"2024-07-18T10:59:43","date_gmt":"2024-07-18T10:59:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/herotime1.com\/?p=31897"},"modified":"2025-07-09T22:50:11","modified_gmt":"2025-07-09T22:50:11","slug":"player-personas-and-why-they-are-important","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/herotime1.com\/academy\/design\/player-personas-and-why-they-are-important\/","title":{"rendered":"Player Personas And Why They Are Important"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tWritten by Niall Crabtree\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/h4>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t
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Niall is the director and designer at Crab Studios, and external designer at Team 17. He specializes in game design. <\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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What is a Player Persona?<\/h2>\n

A player persona is a tool used to design a game for a target audience by using an imaginary individual as a \u201cplayer\u201d to design the game for.<\/p>\n

As a quick example, let\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

From creating this player persona, you can identify the target audiences\u2019 preferences in both design and art, as well as price point in most circumstances.<\/p>\n

How to Make a Player Persona<\/h2>\n

There are a few ways to you start this process, however, I always find that starting the development journey by prototyping a concept that have embroiled you with passion, and then understand the natural player persona for that initial concept, is a great way to guide you through the development process.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, it is valid to start, even before concepting, with outlying a player persona. In this case, there aren\u2019t as many restrictions or rails to keep you in check, so using your inherent understanding of board games and the general preferences of a target audience sector would be a good start.<\/p>\n

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, randomness etc. From there you can build up your player persona and their preferences.<\/p>\n

Designing With Player Personas<\/h2>\n

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

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    Combat\/PVP<\/p>\n<\/li>\n

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    Engine Building<\/p>\n<\/li>\n

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    Territory\/Area Control<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

    Additionally, with more research and playthroughs of the games listed in Dave\u2019s top 5, we can outline key actions\/emotions we want players to experience in our game.<\/p>\n

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      A sense of progression through building an engine and improving your actions each turn<\/p>\n<\/li>\n

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      Meaningful decisions that directly affect yourself and your opponents<\/p>\n<\/li>\n

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      A sense of growth of influence over other players<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

      From this quick, high-level overview, Dave has been very helpful at either helping us with our concept, or adjusting our existing game in order to better cater for our target market.<\/p>\n

      Player Persona Driven Artwork\/Graphics<\/h2>\n

      Let us shift to a different player persona that we will quickly outline.<\/p>\n

      Harry\u2019s top three games on BGG are:<\/p>\n

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        Exploding Kittens<\/p>\n<\/li>\n

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        Unstable Unicorns<\/p>\n<\/li>\n

      • \n

        The Binding of Isaac: Four Souls<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

        Just focusing on the artwork\/graphics, we can see that Harry prefers his games to have:<\/p>\n

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        • \n

          Vibrant colors<\/p>\n<\/li>\n

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          Cute\/simple characters with easily identifiable characteristics<\/p>\n<\/li>\n

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          Iconography over text for key information, but text to help with explaining more complex actions.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

          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.<\/p>\n

          Price Point, With Aid of a Player Persona<\/h2>\n

          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.<\/p>\n

          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.<\/p>\n

          At this point it is prudent to also compare your game with the player persona\u2019s top five and see whether or not the tangible value is similar. If all the player persona\u2019s top 5 have miniatures, and your game does not, this could impact the parity in value in a negative way. This isn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

          \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

          What is a Player Persona? A player persona is a tool used to design a game for a target audience by using an imaginary individual as a \u201cplayer\u201d to design the game for. As a quick example, let\u2019s imagine you are using a player persona called Dave, who likes mid-to-heavy-weight, strategic games, with their top […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[31],"class_list":["post-31897","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-design","tag-design"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nPlayer Personas And Why They Are Important - Hero Time Academy<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/herotime1.com\/academy\/design\/player-personas-and-why-they-are-important\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Player Personas And Why They Are Important - Hero Time Academy\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"What is a Player Persona? 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