The Daily Grind: What's your Bartle quotient?

by Samuel Axon Aug 14th 2008 at 8:00AM

Filed under: Culture, Opinion, The Daily Grind

The Bartle Test of Gamer Psychology has long been a staple of the MUD and MMORPG community. We've ever mentioned it here a couple of times.

The Bartle Test (developed by -- you guessed it -- Richard Bartle) is a series of questions the answers to which result in the test-taker's Bartle Quotient. In your Bartle Quotient, you're told how closely you identify with each of four types of MMO gamer pychologies -- Achiever, Explorer, Killer, and Socializer. The final figure is a ranking -- from most dominant to least dominant -- of those types in your own gaming personality. For example, this blogger is an ESKA.

The test has been criticized over the years as an innacurate or insufficient measurement, but it's remained popular nonetheless. Take the test, and tell us where you stand. Do you feel it's accurate? If not, where did it go wrong?

Tags: achiever, bartle-quotient, bartle-test, bartle-test-of-gamer-psychology, bartle-types, explorer, killer, personality, quiz, richard-bartle, socializer, tdg, test, the-daily-grind

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Angel said on 9:11AM 8-14-2008

I'm an EASK and have been for over 20 years!

pufonthis said on 9:47AM 8-14-2008

I remember doing this test years ago. It didn't seem that great because many questions didn't have a "best answer" for me or I would have picked two or more of the answers depending on the situation.

It's a fun little time-waster though. But as we all know, this is the same guy who makes stupid comments like "Iv'e played Warhammer Online already, it's called WoW".

Jon said on 12:19PM 8-14-2008

Actually, Richard Bartle didn't design the test or the questions in it--but it is based on some of his research.

tmarkelz said on 11:52AM 8-14-2008

I am A.E.K.S.

http://www.gamerdna.com/quizzes/bartle-test-of-gamer-psychology/achiever

Sam QforQ Houston said on 11:57AM 8-14-2008

I'm a SKEA :)

jsquirrel said on 4:41PM 8-14-2008

What a completely over-programmed quiz (that was a pain to get through since it kept choking). What happened to the days of a simple web form with a line of radio buttons?

I can't tell you what I am because I couldn't get past question 7. :(

Waiting for gamerdna.com... 0%

Sam QforQ Houston said on 4:56PM 8-14-2008

We're currently having some technical difficulties at gamerDNA. Please stay tuned to our twitter page at www.twitter.com/gamerDNA for status updates

Sam QforQ Houston said on 7:02PM 8-14-2008

We're back up now :)

tmarkelz said on 9:04PM 8-14-2008

Yeah Jsquirrl, sorry, you happen to hit us right when there was an outage in our data center... which is crazy because just today we were talking about the data connection being a single point of failure... and someone was listening and decided to prove to us that it was :)

Should be fine now though.

Kaoy said on 11:29PM 8-14-2008

Yay! A fellow ESKA! I personally think it's fairly accurate. The thing most people seem to not ealise is that it is meant to be taken while you are in a possitive mind set(or are reasonably happy at the moment) so that it shows what you enjoy doing, rather than what you feel like doing on a bad day(otherwise, we would most all be KEAS or KAES).

I have taken it in various moods before, while rather happy, depressed, and tired. My first attempt was the first time I found it, and I had had a pretty bad month at the time. Lots of bad crap going on. I came out a EKAS, but nothing exceeding 50%, which is somewhat accurate, as a I felt like doing pretty much nothing but wasting time till I was tired enough to sleep.

A few weeks later, things were doing beter for me, and I knew I was a tiny bit of a carebear in games, really, so I decided that couldn't be right. This though came to me while I was having a bout of insomnia though and had been up for about 30 hours. Obviously, I was dog tired. I came out EASK. Only my explorer trait was above 50 this time(70.x%), and everything else was pretty low, with killer bellow 20.

Most recently I decided to take it again while I was wide awake and had some fun coming up with various ideas with other members of Mortal Online that we thought might be pretty neat in a Open PvP enviroment. This time, I came out Achiever 46.67%, Explorer 93.33%, Killer 53.33%, Socializer 73.33%, which is an ESKA score.

I would say this is pretty accurate for me, since I absolutly love seeing as much of the game as I can, while finding a nice core group of party mates or a friendly guild to get into. That's not to say I don't like PvP, becuase I do like it, but in games where there is little consequence for loss, I couldn't really care less if I win or lose. I also like collecting new pieces of armor and beating difficult dungouns or bosses, but more so because I like to make stratagies with party mates on how to go about it and love seeing when they work and improving on them when they fail.

Thats not to say I don't slip into EKAS or EASK on occation when I am in the moods that spawn those things, but that makes sense, since our personalities do shift depending on our moods.

Jeromai said on 1:19AM 8-15-2008

EASK. Always will be. Seeing and experiencing neat/cool stuff is first priority. Figuring out new and clever ways to get things done, or accumulating lots of trivia detail/lore/knowledge, or just climbing up some hard to reach high point jus cos it's there.

I can get sidetracked down the path of incrementing a progress bar, accumulating better or more shtuff really quickly.

I can live without talking to people, but wouldn't mind a good group as long as it's easy to form. (Let's see if WAR breaks any new ground in the social community here.)

And I generally am not out to grief anyone or be griefed on. But in a PvP game where the objective is to go kill people, well, look out when the Achiever part kicks in. :)