[This post is co-authored with Chris Karzmark, a mixed-methods UX & games researcher, and recent Ph.D. graduate from UCSC in Cognitive Psychology.]

Many games ask players to pick a faction. Strategy games typically put this choice at the beginning of a match (e.g., Zerg, Terran, or Protoss in Starcraft) while RPGs might offer branching versions of a questline (e.g., Imperial or Stormcloaks in Skyrim) or even determine the perspective of the entire game (e.g., Blue Stripes or Scoia’tael in The Witcher 2).

In this post, we’ll take a look at how choosing between archetypal factions might create self-selected cohorts with different demographic and motivation profiles, which in turn would lead to important considerations for game/faction balancing and divergent feature preferences between the faction audiences.

The Gamer Motivation Profile

The Gamer Motivation Profile is a 5-minute survey that allows gamers to get a personalized report of their gaming motivations, and see how they compare with other gamers. Over 500,000 gamers worldwide have taken this survey. The 12 motivations that are measured in our model were identified via statistical analysis of how gaming motivations cluster together. You can get a more detailed description of our gamer sample here.

See how you compare with other gamers. Take a 5-minute survey and get your Gamer Motivation Profile along with personalized game recommendations.

The Faction Preference Dataset

Alongside the Gamer Motivation profile, we run a series of optional surveys that gamers can take. In a survey we ran between March 2020 and December 2020, we focused on in-game decisions including faction choices and collected responses from 2,956 gamers (69% male, 27% female, 4% non-binary). The median age was 24 (mean = 25.9, SD = 8.15).

We asked players to pick a faction in 3 archetypal scenarios:

  1. Light/Order Faction vs. Dark/Shadowy Faction
  2. Technology/Engineering Faction vs. Magic/Spells Faction vs. Nature/Animals Faction
  3. Alien Aggressor Side vs. Human Defender Side

For the Light vs. Dark choice, players had to pick one side or the other. For the other two questions, we provided a “No Preference” option.

Light vs. Dark

For the Light vs. Dark faction choice, we saw an almost evenly-split response—49% chose Light while 51% chose Dark. Non-binary gender players were more likely to select the Dark side. Players who chose the Light side were slightly older than those who chose the Dark side.

Players who prefer the Dark side are much more likely to enjoy chaos, destruction, guns, and explosives. They also prefer faster pacing, are more competitive, and care less about narrative and getting to know the NPCs.

Players who prefer the Dark side are much more likely to enjoy chaos, destruction, guns, and explosives.

Motivations, like IQ and personality traits, are man-made constructs that are entirely relative measures. They have no natural 0-point values. They only exist in comparison between people. And thus, the most meaningful way to visualize them is to benchmark them against the known group average. For example, it doesn’t make sense to plot IQ starting from 0 because 1) it diminishes the visual differences between people of normal IQ (around 100), and 2) 0 is not the minimum IQ value since it is possible to have negative IQ.

The average percentile of a group can never be 100 or 0. Consider that the average height of a basketball team is always less than the height of its tallest player. So 0 and 100 percentiles are not meaningful floor/ceiling values because they are impossible group averages. If you are stats-savvy enough to wonder about normalized values: consider if we were plotting these in z-scores instead (with a mean of 0 as the origin point, i.e., the equivalent of 50th%-tile assuming normal distribution), what would we use as the y-axis limits in that case since the 0-point is already being used as the origin line?

Technology vs. Magic vs. Nature

The Magical faction was the most popular faction—respondents were twice as likely to select it compared with the Nature faction. If we look just at the male and female players, their preferences are essentially flipped between the Technology and Nature factions—men are twice as likely to prefer the Technology faction, while women are twice as likely to prefer the Nature faction. The non-binary gender players are almost equally distributed across the 3 factions. Players who select the Nature faction are slightly older.

The motivation differences here were larger than in the Light vs. Dark question. This surprised us, as we expected the factions with a good/bad element to capture a more fundamental divide in players. However, it may be that these three factions reveal a more salient aesthetic preference. Also, having three factions to pick from rather than two may have allowed for more interesting choices, rather than being forced between two simplistic options.

The Nature and Technology factions tend to have opposing motivations, with the Magic faction sitting somewhere in the middle (often a bit closer to nature). Players who chose the Technology faction want a lot more chaos and mayhem, and faster-paced, competitive gameplay. They care much less about customization and being immersed in a rich world setting. Players who chose the Nature faction are essentially the exact opposite—they prefer slower-paced, tranquil, non-adversarial gameplay with a rich world setting and lots of customization options.

The Nature and Technology factions tend to have opposing motivations.

Alien Aggressor vs. Human Defender

The majority of players preferred the Human Defender side. Non-binary gender players were about twice as likely to not pick a side. Players who preferred the Alien Aggressor side are younger.

Non-binary gender players were about twice as likely to not pick a side.

The appeal of Destruction was the most salient feature of those who selected the Alien side. These players are also more competitive, interested in power progression, and experimenting with the game’s mechanics and exploring the game world.

Given that alien invaders and dark factions are both causing mayhem and disturbing the status quo, we might ask if these are basically the same choice, and there is some truth to that: 74% of the Alien Aggressor players also chose the Dark faction, and 60% of the Human Defender players also chose the Light faction. However, the Alien Aggressor group is about half the size of the Dark faction, so they can’t all be the same people.

Designing Gameplay for Factions

What the data consistently shows is that faction choices create self-selected audience cohorts with distinct demographic and motivation differences. And while many online games with factions allow players to create characters on both sides, the survey findings suggest that most players have a clear preference. In turn, these faction choices lead to different game design considerations for faction/mechanic balancing especially for the long-term health of the player base—players in different factions end up wanting different kinds of game features.

Players in different factions end up wanting different kinds of game features.

If your game has a clear good guy/bad guy choice, odds are that players picking the good guys are more interested in the game’s story and those picking the bad guys are more interested in blowing stuff up. When designing missions/levels for each faction, this should inform the length and frequency of dialogue vs. action sections—players who pick the “good guy” side probably want to spend more time with the narrative and getting to know characters, those who pick the “bad guys” may just want to get to the next fight (or at least want skippable cutscenes).

If the factions in your game don’t have a clear good/bad split, then the popularity of the factions may be more lopsided and the factional differences in player’s gaming motivations may be even more pronounced as we saw in the Technology/Magic/Nature choice.

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About Our Co-Authors

Chris Karzmark is a mixed-methods UX and games researcher, and recent Ph.D. graduate from UCSC in Cognitive Psychology. His graduate research was on how our mental models of abstract concepts play out in games and other technology. In his dissertation, he showed that conscious awareness of a metaphor can strengthen the emotional impact of a metaphorical game. As of this blog post, he is looking for full time jobs in UX research, particularly in the games industry (check out https://chriskarzmark.com/). For fun, he’s in 8 tabletop campaigns right now, 3 of which he’s GMing, and he has logged almost 5000 hours in Europa Universalis.