Player Persona Research

This paper examines the concept of "persona" in player research, arguing that two distinct understandings of the term, one drawn from anthropology and psychology and the other from market research and human-computer interaction, can and should be synthesized. The discussion traces the etymology of persona from its origins as a theatrical mask, through Jungian and Goffmanian usages, to its contemporary sense as a constructed public self in online media and games. It then develops the notion of "player persona" as a first-person vantage point, the identity of "I-as-a-player," which differs from both an in-game character and an everyday personality. Drawing on theorists such as Vygotsky, Goffman, Fink, and Abrahams, the author argues that players experience a discontinuity between their personal selves and their player positions.

The paper contends that HCI studies, which model players into aggregate types for design purposes, and phenomenological accounts of gameplay experience, which emphasize the player position, address complementary aspects of the same phenomenon. The proposed research agenda calls for an interdisciplinary attitude and a mixed-method approach, triangulating statistical analyses of telemetry and survey data with qualitative interviews. The stated goal is to understand how adopting the player position alters self-experience, how statistically derived player types correspond to players' self-understanding, and how values are expressed through gaming behavior, potentially across cultures. The paper is a conceptual and theoretical proposal and does not report original empirical findings or sample data.