“I am an award-winning game designer. My overriding philosophy is that anything can be and should be regarded as a game.”

So says Dr Richard Bartle, Professor of Computer Game Design at the University of Essex, co-creator of the world’s first online multiplayer adventure and a designer who features often in lists of the most influential developers of all time.

In 1978, in a computer lab at Essex University, Richard and Roy Trubshaw created a text-based game that became the foundation of the MMORPG — or Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game.

“If they hadn’t made it,” writes Keith Stuart in The Guardian, “online adventures like EverQuest and World of Warcraft may never have happened.” Today, multiplayer online games like League of Legends and Hearthstone have around 100 million monthly active users; and the market for these and ‘battle arena’ games like DOTA 2 is valued at $100bn+.

Richard’s Designing Virtual Worlds text book and ‘Bartle’s Taxonomy’ - his classification of game players according to their personality and preferences — are cornerstones of game design.

Game Academy is excited that Richard has agreed to become an advisor to our venture. GA co-founder David Barrie caught up with him, to talk the skills of game players, value of games to learning and of virtual worlds in general.

David Barrie (Game Academy): What do you think is the value of Game Academy?

Richard: You’re switching people on. You’re shining a light on what game players previously knew deep down and making it explicit. Once players realise that actually they have far more skills than they think they have, they can use that knowledge to inform their choices.

What have games taught you?

I haven’t consciously thought “hey, that’s a great thing I’ve learned from playing, studying or designing a game — I’ll apply it to my work!”. However, because games have been woven into my life from an early age, obviously many of the things I’ve learned will have manifested themselves in what I do. Because life is a game, you can extrapolate that to my existence in general.

What is the teaching potential of games?

Games are and always have been related to how human beings learn and teach and through play, players develop as people.

Games are particularly good for high-order mental processes, such as problem-solving. They’re process-oriented and because they convey their message through a procedural logic, as academic and designer Ian Bogost describes it, they help to structure thinking.

For particular games that teach particular things…the meaning is in the gameplay. I’d say that MMORPGs as a whole teach people about themselves. Historical games such as Europa Universalis teach people about how some aspects of history. Games like Sid Meier’s Pirates!, the geography of the Caribbean.

I use game design principles in my work all of the time, in my lectures, lesson plans and teaching, right down to using cartoon-like fonts in Powerpoint extravaganzas.

Closing slide of Bartle presentation on ‘Why People Play Games Instead of Reading Books’ — Café Scientifique, December 2014 — https://mud.co.uk/richard/presntns.htm

What has been your greatest in-game achievement?

It rather depends on whom I’m trying to impress! I’m a game designer. Your question is the equivalent of asking an architect what their greatest achievement inside a building is. I don’t consider any of my achievements in games great, because I don’t play games for those kinds of reasons.

OK. Let’s put the question another way. What’s the greatest pleasure for you in a game?

Fun. I find them fun because I’m a designer and I enjoy looking at their design. I enjoy looking at students’ games and telling students what their games are saying. Reality is though that knowing why you find games fun is going to be more important to you — than knowing why I find them fun. So here’s a challenge: ask yourself why you find games fun, and whether this ‘fun-ness’ extends (or could be extended) to when you’re not playing games.

Your commitment to games feels total, almost ideological, driven by ideas of tolerance, rationality and social advance. A colleague once said you see games as a counter-force that allow people “to imagine more and more interesting and freer worlds” than anything else they might come across. Tell me more.

People should be judged on their strength of character, not on the accident of their birth. Virtual worlds were first created in the pre-graphics days to encourage people to be and become themselves. By playing such a game, the constraints imposed on you by your social circumstances were removed: it didn’t matter what age, gender, sexuality, ethnic background or social class you came from, you started out the same as everyone else. You could forge your own destiny, and in so doing come to understand who you are. Games are — and have always been — a crucible for identity construction. Sadly, the real is forcing itself into the virtual so much these days that the effect is no longer what it was. It’s still there, but the concept probably needs a reboot.

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Want to find out more about Game Academy, and sign up to our first course on Decision-Making? You can register via our website.

Want to help us develop Game Academy and get closer to the development of our venture? Apply to join our private Facebook group.

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