Designing a Personality System for Video Games

If you're like me, you have a gaming library that is all over the place. Maybe one day you're saving the galaxy in a sprawling RPG, and the next you're meticulously organizing a virtual farm, and the day after that you're losing badly in a competitive shooter. I love a diverse range of games, but how do we talk about these games? The genre tags we use, like action-adventure or simulator, have become so broad they're almost useless. What does it even mean to say you like RPGs when that could mean anything from Pokémon Yellow to Cyberpunk 2077. And don't get me wrong, some systems try to help. Steam user tags can be really useful. You see things like open world, story rich, difficult, and you can click them to find other games tagged the same way. But you also see cats, memes, or cartoony used to try to communicate something about the game. It's a mix of genre, mechanics, theme, aesthetics, and community inside jokes. It is helpful, but it's inconsistent, and it's not standardized. There's no real framework. I've always been fascinated by personality tests, like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Now, this is not me endorsing the Myers-Briggs. There's lots of problems that arise when we try to use it. It's not backed by real science. It may as well be a horoscope. But it's what it's trying to do that I find so fascinating. Personality tests try to give us a language to describe something complex. Ourselves. So it got me thinking, what if we could do that for video games? What if we could design a kind of personality test that ignores genre and theme and instead focuses on the one thing that truly matters: what it feels like to play the game? And that's our quest today. We're gonna try, here and now, to build a system from first principles to do just that. Let's call it the Game Type Indicator, or or the GTI. The goal isn't to be definitive, but to explore the idea and create a tool that might help us all understand and discover games in a brand new way. So let's start with what I think is the most fundamental question: what is the game's primary reason for being? The obvious split is story versus gameplay, but that's too simple, right? A game like Hades has amazing gameplay, But the story is also incredible and it's core to the experience. So it's not about if a game has a story, but which one is the game's foundational pillar? What is the core thing that pulls you, the player, through the experience? Let's call this first dimension focus. Does the story exist to serve the mechanics, or are the mechanics only present to spotlight the story? So it's either going to be narrative first, where the mechanics exist to serve the story, like in The Last of Us. Or it's mechanics first, where the story exists to serve the gameplay, like in Street Fighter. Next, how do we exist in the game world? What is the player's perspective? My first thought was camera perspective— first person, third person, top-down— but that's too superficial. Playing Cyberpunk 2077 in first person and God of War in third person can still feel similar in terms of agency. The real difference is about your role. Are you embodied in the game world, or are you an overseer puppeteering things like a hand in the sky? Let's call this dimension stance. You're either an actor directly controlling a character on the ground, or you're a director managing things from a removed perspective, like in Civilization. Now, how does this experience unfold? The easy approach to that is linear versus open world, but that breaks down. Elden Ring is an open world, but it has structured dungeons. A linear game can have moments of unexpected player-driven chaos. So it's not about the map, it's about the nature of causality. Is the game built on defined game states or on dynamic systems that cause unscripted outcomes? So let's call this progression. The path either has emergent progression from player agency and interacting systems, like in Breath of the Wild, Or it's a structured progression, a path largely predefined by the designers, like in Super Mario Bros. Okay, now for the mental load. A common way to define mental load is difficult versus easy, but that's subjective. I might find a game difficult that you find easy. So a better question is, how many moving parts do I have to understand? A game like Super Hexagon is incredibly difficult, but its rules are dead simple. A game like Crusader Kings 3 can be played in a very chill, relaxed way, but the systems are vast. So this isn't about difficulty, it's about the game's internal intricacy. Let's call this complexity. A game is either low complexity, with straightforward and intuitive rules, or it's high complexity, with intricate interconnected systems that demand a lot of brainpower to master. But this isn't quite enough. Let's take Minecraft. We could call this a mechanics-first, actor-emergent, low-complexity game, but the feeling of playing it is so different from other games that also fit that description. Minecraft can be super chill and relaxing, but then you take Rocket League, also mechanics-first, actor-emergent, low-complexity, but relaxing is the last word I'd use to describe it. It's pure adrenaline. So we need more dimensions to capture that feeling. And for that relaxing versus frantic feeling, I think it's really about who controls the tempo. So let's call this next dimension pacing. On one side, we have a relaxed experience where the experience is generally low stress because the player sets the pace, like in Stardew Valley. The tempo can increase, but only when the player chooses to take it there. On the other side, We have a tense experience where the game imposes a demanding tempo or stressful situations, like Elden Ring. And now finally, what about other people? The simple binary here is single-player versus multiplayer, but that's not clear enough. Baldur's Gate 3 is a single-player game that you can play with friends. Fortnite is a multiplayer game that you could play solo. The real difference is the social context the game is designed for. So let's call this final dimension encounters. Is the game's social environment a private scope, meaning it's designed for either you alone or for a closed group of friends you invite, where you have control over who you're interacting with? Or is it an open scope, where the game's design pushes you into a world with strangers like in an MMO or with public matchmaking? And there we have it, 6 dimensions, each refined from a simple idea into something that I think More accurately captures what it feels like to play a game. Focus, stance, progression, complexity, pacing, and encounters. And together they form our 6-letter game type indicator code. So let's see this in action. If we compare the game type of Minecraft, Baldur's Gate 3, and League of Legends, we can see where they overlap and where they differ. Suddenly we have this language that's much more descriptive than sandbox, RPG, or MOBA, but this is how it becomes a The first, simplest way to use this is to spot broad patterns. Maybe you classify your 10 favorite games, and you have an aha moment. Wow, 8 of them are director games. You might just fundamentally prefer overseeing things to being down in the action. That single letter can tell you more about your tastes than any genre tag ever could. But you can go deeper. You can look for clusters. You might find that you really love NAE games. That's narrative-first, actor-driven, in emergent worlds. And that's a specific vibe. It's a feeling of freedom and story combined. Now you can look for other NAE games, even if one is a sprawling western and another is a space mystery. You're looking for a similar experience, not always a similar theme. And here's where I think it gets really interesting. Think back to Baldur's Gate 3. Its code is NAEHTTP. Maybe what captivated someone else about the game was the epic story, but then what resonated with you was specifically the combination of an emergent world where your choices create chaos, with high complexity systems that are rewarding to learn, and tense high-stakes outcomes. That's the EHT profile. Suddenly you realize that same experiential core exists in a completely different game, like the strategy roguelike FTL: Faster Than Light, Which is M-D-E-H-T-P. It's not a fantasy RPG. You're a director, not an actor, but it shares that specific DNA of emergent, complex, and tense decision-making. This game type indicator helps you find that hidden connection you would have never seen otherwise. And that brings me to the real reason I find this so fascinating. For me, creating a system like this isn't really about trying to understand the world of video games. It's about trying to understand myself and other people. It helps me figure out what I'm truly drawn to, what challenges I find meaningful, what kind of experiences stick with me long after the credits roll. It's a tool for self-discovery. I tend to do this kind of thing a lot. I create taxonomies and systems that take big complex ideas and make them more manageable, not so that we can cram these things into a box, But so that we can communicate with each other about them. It's less about understanding the games and more about me wanting to connect with you. When you tell me you had an experience that meant something to you, I want to know what it was that resonated so strongly. And maybe, at least with video games, this can give us more language to relate to each other with, to find commonality. And one of the most interesting things about trying to cram a complex idea into a framework is seeing which pieces just fall out of the box and don't fit. Language is a construct. Games are a construct. Our identities are a construct. And when we see which parts of us don't fit into a predefined framework, those are probably the parts most worth celebrating. But this is just theoretical. The real test is putting it into practice. So I want you to think about your favorite game, and in the comments below, try to give it a GTI code. Do you think some of these dimensions need to be reworked? Maybe there are some games that contain so many different experiences that different parts of the same game need different GTI codes. Let me know what you think. See you next time. See you next time.