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Bartle's four player types as a design lens for appealing gamification elements

Design · All designs
Evidence · 1 claim (1 mixed) · 1 study (1 associational), q2 · 0 of 1 report an effect size · 1 claim rests on one study

Description

The article adopts Richard Bartle's (1996) taxonomy of game players as an explanatory framework for designing gamification layers that appeal to varied learners. As printed, "there are four main types of game player: competitors, explorers, achievers and socializers". The article argues that elements such as leaderboards and badges must appeal across these types — leaderboards suit competitors and achievers but not explorers or socializers, group or guild participation suits socializers but not competitors, and finding external resources suits explorers and competitors but not achievers or socializers — which makes gamification design for a wide variety of learners difficult and time-consuming.

Design Implications

Context

Requirements

  • Gamification elements applied to a course should appeal to all the different types of game player in order to be useful for a wide variety of learners

Constraints

  • The article states it is not as simple as making students compete against each other and using a leaderboard, and that designing for varied understandings of gaming makes the design process difficult

Target Learners

  • undergraduate students with varied gaming backgrounds and expectations

Learning Goals

  • student engagement with gamified course content

Claims

Examples

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Key Sources

  • Robert Bajko, Jaigris Hodson, Katie Seaborn, Pamela Livingstone, Deborah Fels. (2016). Edugamifying Media Studies: Student Engagement, Enjoyment, and Interest in Two Multimedia and Social Media Undergraduate Classrooms. Information Systems Education Journal 14(6). https://www.isedj.org
Page metadata
Field Value
type design
id bartle-four-player-types-design-lens
title Bartle's four player types as a design lens for appealing gamification elements
description The article adopts Richard Bartle's (1996) taxonomy of game players as an explanatory framework for designing gamification layers that appeal to varied learners.
status review
generated by process:settle-candidates on 2026-11-03
trust unverified — no one has confirmed this page's content
sources 1 — robert-bajko-2016

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