Facts about Players - Learn to Play: Designing Tutorials for Video Games - page 80

and formative work that gives us data about our target populations.
Unfortunately, these are way bigger topics than I can fit into this
topic. I also don't have the expertise to comment on a lot of them.
However, education and cognitive psychology do give us many gener-
alities about the human mind that transcend these sorts of character-
istics. If you want to truly understand your audience, I'd recommend
checking out the further reading in the Appendix at the back of the
topic and reading up on some other authors who are doing amazing
work regarding demographic and personal characteristics and con-
sumption of games. For now, I will talk about a few constants of the
mind that will affect how players solve the problems in your game,
learn from them, and play them.
A type of psychology sometimes called individual differences psy-
chology focuses on the differences between human beings while still
establishing some constant psychological effects. Again, this is beyond
the scope of the topic, but it is deinitely worth some further study.
Individual differences psychology tells us that parts of the human
being that are independent of our treatment (in this case, the treat-
ment is the video game) are going to affect how the person reacts to
what we present. In traditional psychological research, we gather as
much data as is humanly possible so that after the fact we can analyze
it for correlations and linkages. This means that it is entirely con-
ceivable, for example, that eye color could be correlated with desire
for chocolate, right-handedness could be correlated with the urge to
become a mad scientist, and so on. These things are largely out of our
control. There are some things, however, that are not.
Psychologists are interested in how the individual sees and per-
ceives the world. Often, preferences in problem solving, interpersonal
communication, and social skills are interrogated using psychometric
tests. One such test that illustrates the differences and similarities
between players is called the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, * or MBTI.
The MBTI is a type of test that divides peoples' personalities into
different letters, which represent different elements of thinking and
problem solving. There is a very good chance you have taken one of
these during your life as part of a job or career placement test. Results
* Briggs Myers, I. (1988). Gifts differing: Understanding personality type. Mountain
View, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press.