Winners
These players simply want to win at the game. They don't care if they do the exact same thing a hundred times to win. They think of the game as something that challenges them and that they push against, and they are happy whenever they overcome that challenge. To them, exploits don't really exist: any exploit is simply a feature of the game you can use to potentially win.
Explorers
These players also play to win, but they really crave variety. They want the game to be different each time. They want to have a different challenge each time. And they don't see the point of winning the same scenario twice.
They also don't mind as much if they occasionally lose because they're blindsided by some new thing they weren't aware of, as long as it's ultimately possible to learn how to deal with the new thing and overcome it. So they like random starting scenarios, random events, lots of different options and experiences to have.
Painters
These players want to create something cool looking in the game. They see the game’s contents as a palette of things that they can use to create a really cool looking thing, whether that be a city or an airship or a colony or whatever.
They don't really care about victory conditions or indeed any game mechanics - if anything, mechanics can get in the way. They are perfectly happy, for example, to create a huge structure made out of bits of statues and boats and other random, miscellaneous items, right in the middle of their city, that looks like a giant reactor that powers the whole city. In the fiction they are creating, this is what's happening. It's a giant reactor. They don't care about it actually being inert, game mechanically speaking.
Engineers
They also don't care about the official victory conditions: they care about using the game's mechanics to be clever. So they're the ones who might build a really beautifully efficient city where everyone is maximally happy and the layout is perfect. Their creations will also have a kind of functional beauty, but what matters to them is the actual mechanics.
Gardeners
They just want to be in the game world and potter around and relax. They're happy to do the exact same actions over and over again and actively don't want to win (or lose) because that would end the game they're enjoying. They do engage with the game mechanics, they're just not playing to win.
So in Minecraft:
- Winners will try to speed run the Ender Dragon.
- Explorers will go around finding cool new ways to slay the Ender Dragon.
- Painters will go into creative mode and build giant cathedrals.
- Engineers will make ultra-efficient automated chicken farms.
- Gardeners will build a cute cottage and then do their rounds feeding the chickens and tending the crops and shearing the sheep and making flower arrangements.
It's hard to make everyone happy
The thing is, if you have a game where you can build things, your player base will most likely be made of a mix of those five types of player - and what they want can often conflict. Here are some examples.
Let's say you find an exploit in a game that makes it easy to just get lots of money. That's not how the game is meant to work, and so you patch it out.
Winners are annoyed because hey, that exploit was just part of the game. That's just part of the correct way to play. Now you've removed it, all of their previous victories have been called into question.
Explorers are happy because the exploit collapsed down the ways in which you could play the game. You had to use this exploit to win. Most of the other options in the game just weren't good enough to win with. They want to win in lots of different ways, so if you have something that's completely dominant, it messes up their experience.
Painters are quite possibly also annoyed, because they were using that exploit to get infinite money so they could just paint whatever they wanted. Now, you’ve forced them to actually engage with the mechanics that they don't care about.
Engineers might be annoyed because you've just broken the really clever construction that they came up with based on that exploit and now it doesn't work anymore. Or maybe they're happy because they feel that, yes, it was an ugly game bug.
Gardeners may well not care, unless it forces them to abandon their existing relaxed way of playing the game.
Or let's say you just add a whole bunch of new decorative options.
Painters and Gardeners are happy because, hey, new pretty stuff. Everyone else doesn't really care very much and might be pointing at the big list of bugs and going, why did you not fix these things instead?
Or you're listening to a bunch of feedback from winners and you reduce the randomness in the game to make it more possible to do competitive play. Now the explorers are annoyed because you've made the game boring. And everyone else might be annoyed too because you've changed things pointlessly.
It's very difficult to keep everyone happy as the core design of your game really biases it towards one kind of player or another.
Let's say you have a colony/city builder. Can you even win? Is there a win condition, or do you just keep on making more stuff? Real world cities don't have a win condition, after all.
Are there random events like a failed harvest or a raid or something? Well, then you've made explorers happy because interesting stuff is happening and things are different. You've quite possibly made painters happy because here's a cool thing that they can incorporate into their design.
Winners, however, are annoyed because they're trying to measure themselves against the game. Iif a good thing happens they wonder, well, have I now won because of my skill or because of a good random event? It can take away their feeling of victory. Of course, they’re also not happy to lose because of a bad random event occurring, so they don't want random events at all.
As for engineers, they want to build their perfect machinery. For them random events are annoying to deal with and also unwanted. And gardeners get their relaxing gaming sessions interrupted by the game demanding that they deal with the event.
How many rules do you have for placing things? Winners will just take this in stride. Engineers will feel like, yes, yes, this makes it a really interesting puzzle. Explorers might think, okay, if it's interesting content, that's fine. Painters, on the other hand, will be mad at you because you're messing up their ideas for how things could look by adding all of these rules.
Almost inevitably, if you make this kind of game, even if it's biased in one way or another, you're going to have all five kinds of players in there. These players aren't aware that they are a particular type. To them, this is just how you obviously play the game, so they will come to you and give you feedback based on how you obviously play the game. And this feedback will really conflict.
My own experiences
Airships: Conquer the Sky is a game where you build steampunk airships out of modules. When I initially made the game, I was thinking about engineers first and also about winners. I wanted it to be a game about figuring out effective ways of building airships, having fights and measuring yourself against each other.
I did also think a bit about explorers in the sense of adding different scenarios, random events, different bonuses you could use, and so on, but this was really a secondary consideration. And I really wasn't thinking about painters or gardeners.
Now, it turns out that airships are cool and lots of people have thoughts and feelings about their ships, and so there's a lot of painters in the player base. You can tell if an airship in the game is designed by a painter, because they will put together decorative items in a way that suggests that there are functional things there, even if they don’t functionally do anything: that thing there is a crystal that's keeping the ship up, that thing there is a bit of engine, over here is a mast, over there are some chimneys that aren’t actually connected to anything.
Over the last ten years, a lot of what’s been going on has been me trying to add more visual possibilities to a game that originally wasn't all that visual in terms of possibilities for decoration. One of the difficulties with player feedback and balancing is that, from a painter's point of view, a lot of the stuff I put in that's aimed at engineers is just annoying. There's limitations on how you can place things, and that's just frustrating if you have an idea of what your ship should look like.
Sometimes there are also exploits or weird bugs that aren't being reported because painters don't care; winners just see this as part of the game, even if it's weird and breaks the fiction of it; and engineers feel like they're really clever for having found out this exploit and might actively hide it from me, because they would be sad if I patch the exploit.
Thinking about the types
This typology is, of course, a typology: it is an artificial way of categorizing people. Probably no one is purely in one of those five buckets. I would say, unsurprisingly, that I am mostly an explorer, somewhat a winner, a little bit an engineer, rarely a gardener, and really not a painter.
The point of this is that it's not intended to be a value judgment. These are all valid ways of engaging with a game. It's not that winners are narrow-minded or painters aren't real gamers or something like that. It's something to be aware of when you're reading feedback and when you're designing your game: how are these types of player going to think about features in your game?
Are you fixing something which will actually break it horribly for another group of players? Should you be offering multiple game modes that are suited to different types of player, like Minecraft having hardcore, survival, and creative mode?
Should your game have a victory condition? Minecraft added a victory condition that pretty much lampshaded the idea of there being a victory condition in an open world game. They went, “Okay then, I guess here's a way to win you can kill this dragon. Are you happy now?”
When you're creating your game's marketing materials and its visual appearance and tone, think about which of those player types you're actually trying to attract. If you are making a game that looks very attractive to one type, but then actually is geared towards the needs of another, you might have a very unsuitable and annoyed player base.
The theoretically ideal solution
These five player types don't actually have to be in conflict, it's just really hard to get there. If the optimal way of building something based on the current environment is also maximally interesting and flavorful and beautiful and effective… then everyone is pretty much happy.
It's easier to explain this point by looking at a case where this isn't happening. In Minecraft, from a purely functional point of view, you can just live in a hole in the ground, so there is no point in building a beautiful castle. Actual castles in the real world, though, were very much shaped by hard-headed concerns about functionality. They were built to win, based on their current environment, and employing all the cleverness that people could think of. That satisfies winners, explorers, painters and engineers. (And gardeners will be happy as long as you can turn the difficulty way down.)
The actual real life circumstances that shape castles are intensely complex. There aren't any games that get anywhere near to that level of detail and balance. Yes, reality is balanced. But games have to be simpler and more approachable than reality, so you can't just try to copy reality.
So the real challenge is to make game systems that are simpler and more fun and more comprehensible than reality, while still giving rise to the same interesting emergent complexity as in real life.
Good luck with that.