Bartle's player types
Also said as Achievers, explorers, socialisers, killers, Bartle taxonomy
Richard Bartle's 1996 paper sorted players of MUDs, which are text-based online worlds, into four kinds: achievers, explorers, socialisers and killers.
It gives a team useful words for "not everyone wants what you want". Use it for that only. It came from long discussions among the administrators of one kind of game, and it was not built from data. Nick Yee's surveys later found the parts of each type do not reliably go together, and the online Bartle test forces people to pick. Bartle himself never meant it to cover all games.
Say it
“Everything we have planned rewards completion. Add one thing for people who like poking at how the world works: a hidden area with no marker and no reward. Do not call them explorers on the slide as if that were science.”
Where you’ve seen it
Bartle's own case was MUD1, the text world Roy Trubshaw began in 1978 and Bartle went on to finish, which is a long way from the games the types are now applied to.
Not to be confused with audience segment
A segment comes from data about your own players. Bartle's types are a thirty-year-old theory about MUD players, so do not plan a marketing budget around them.