Filtering player temperament through game design

[Ominous]

@Kestrel said:

For my part, I recently found myself deep-diving some studies on how preferences for certain genres and literary themes correlate with certain personality traits.

Game design theory is right up my alley. Care to share the sauce?

In response to the main question of the thread, I am not sure anyone intentionally incorporates game design elements to weed out specific subsets of players. I think people just try to build the best game for what they’re looking for, and if that weeds out certain groups that the designer didn’t want playing the game anyways, that’s a bonus, as Apos and Faraday said.

[hellfrog]

I mean, there was some of this for sure. For player helpers on Arx, one of the questions was 'name a woman who is not fictional or dead who is smarter than you are."

And it did drive some assholes away, fully intended.

[Tez]

Are there aspects of your game design that exist almost as an intentional net to filter certain player temperaments?

Maybe.

[Roadspike]

I tend to design games to encourage a particular playstyle, rather than to repel one. Mostly.

Most of this comes down to the mission statement that defines the whole game design (and gameplay) process. I will be very clear about what the game is and isn’t there, in hopes that people will self-select whether they’ll like the game or not. Policies are the next step, being very clear what will be encouraged and disallowed (PvP rules; alt rules; IC and OOC harassment rules; social contract; plotrunning rules; how real-life prejudices will be handled in a modern, historical, or near-historical setting; etc).

My general workflow is to determine what kind of RP I want to see on the game, how to support and encourage that, spot and remove any roadblocks to it (the waygate system in The Fifth World is my best example of that, we had a multi-planetary game, but didn’t want barriers to casual RP, so we added limited instant travel in so folks could be on whichever planet they wanted), and then let players know what the intended thrust of RP will be.

That being said, most of the choices of what I want to play: PvE, zero-tolerance-for-harassment, collaborative playstyle, combination of action and casual, clear reasons for people to work together (with IC friction), lend themselves toward the type of players that I enjoy playing with.

[Kestrel]

@Ominous

This is more to do with media genres in a broader sense than game design, but I think that if you’re working on a storytelling game, it applies.

—>Also, here is a big fat disclaimer that this describes trends, not individual tastes<—

So the two (commonly measured) personality traits that I personally would care most about in a large/open playerbase are empathy and openness to experience. It doesn’t matter as much in a TTRPG small group of friends, but if you wanted to open a MUD that anyone can join under an anonymous username, you ideally want to cultivate a playerbase that’s prosocial, considerate, and more likely to yes-and than no-but or poo-poo other people’s fun.

There are actually a whole bunch of studies that have looked at the way consuming literature can either develop a reader’s empathy, or may be motivated by high empathy to begin with. For example, this 2013 article demonstrated that when readers feel emotionally transported into the narrative, it had a positive effect on their empathy over time. So in theory if I wanted to design a game that encourages players to experience greater empathy for other players, I might want to consider tools that provide an insight into other characters’ inner workings. For example, I could incentivise in-character journal entries, incorporate IC mind-reading/telepathy/psychic tools that let one character gain insight into another character’s emotional state or thoughts, etc. This study showed something similar, though I’ll note it later had some replication issues that, IMO, could be explained by the way the previous article focused not just on “reading fiction”, but how we read/experience fiction.

More recently in 2025, a study looked at the film genres preferred by college students and found some correlations between genre preference and OCEAN personality traits. The most useful finding for me in this is that mystery correlates with openness to experience, because “mystery” doesn’t have to be a standalone genre, it’s something you can incorporate into any game. And anecdotally I’ve noticed that whenever a game has some big central puzzle theme, a lot of people really hate it and don’t care about it, but they tend not to be players I like playing with anyway. So … good?

There are also a lot of small-scale tools you could incorporate to encourage mystery, and you could even combine them with tools I suggested in the previous paragraph. For instance, if you encouraged characters to write up personal secrets, you could then also add another tool that allows other characters to uncover them in fragments. You could have some kind of psychic power that allows multiple characters to pool together their energy, and then each one has a chance to uncover a different portion of their target’s inner thoughts/feelings/goals etc. Rather than having journal entries be public automatically, you could design a system that both rewards writing them, and rewards uncovering someone else’s journal entries by going through their house or something.

Lastly, and this may be controversial because I know the hobby loves this genre, but I think I would personally avoid horror as a central theme, based on this metastudy. And again, going back to the big fat disclaimer, this isn’t a criticism of individual tastes; I love lots of horror films! Obsession was great. But horror fans trend younger and lower in empathy. So what I would expect to see is that while the majority of players on any horror game are normal and chill, the extreme types of problem-players would probably be a little more extreme.

[Muscle Car]

@Kestrel You remind me of the endless disappointment my younger self felt when creating and trying to promote sophisticated RP on Age of Conan, a game with some neat stuff but also with fatalities, PvP and boobies. Looking back I’m surprised how high my hopes were; true, it was based off complex mechanics and the dizzying world building of Robert E. Howard, but on the other hand a lot of people just saw it as a platform for Skinemax horror and power tripping. Guess which player base dominated the game at the end.

So yes, amazing and high quality stuff can come from horror settings, but some people will only see them with the dimmest, most self-serving eyes.

[Tez]

@Muscle-Car
I would have been there day one.

[hellfrog]

I would have been there skinemax power tripping day one.

[bear_necessities]

@Tez is that a game you are designing right now?

[Tez]

Maybe. Obviously I’m not ready to announce yet but the question was so fkn well-matched to my FAQ that I couldn’t resist.