Ranking My Play Personalities

Thinking Play had a very interesting post recently about Play Personalities, something I had never heard of before. I recommend reading it. It’s a bit like a Meyers-Briggs test for how you spend your leisure time, or the Bartle Test. Here’s my self-assessment of how I fit the different play personalities:

The Joker. Nope. Well, maybe a little. Sometimes I do like to poke fun at things that other people find deadly serious, much to my own detriment on Twitter. Although I am not a “class clown” by any stretch of the imagination.

The Kinesthete. When I was younger, sure, but not now that walking across a room has a relatively high chance of causing injuries.

The Explorer. I can strongly relate to this one, in that I am constantly seeking out new things to learn and study. I don’t ever physically go to new places though. In theory that would be fun but *cough* massive anxiety *cough*.

The Competitor. I don’t seek out competitions anymore, but when I do get involved in a competition, I always try to win and crush the hopes and dreams of all opposition. In a nice way.

The Director. Nope, nope, nope, and more nope.

The Collector. Not really. In the past I flirted with collecting guitars, and I think it would be fun to collect real live swords, but I’m too dern miserly in my old age now. (Although some guitars can be good investments… hmmmm.)

The Artist/Creator. Of course the one with a slash in it and the most awkward to write in a sentence is the one I probably most identify with. When I look back over my life and try to generalize all of the things I’ve had fun doing, I would say that the one thread that connects them all is creating things that weren’t there before. Software development, writing, music, blogging, videos, drawing. It is one of the great ironies of my life that it’s hard to earn a living doing most of these enjoyable things.

The Storyteller. I can also relate to this one. Not only in the form of writing stories, but you can also see this aspect of me most recently in my 58-part YouTube playthrough of Stormblood-Why not watch it today! You might be the first one!-which was very much “play” for me. You can see it in a lot of my blog posts, too, since I usually try to make at least some attempt to entertain, and I try to make my posts a sort of narrative from the top to the bottom. Except for this one of course, which is just a straight infodump.

If I were to rank these play personalities, I would probably do it like this:

1. The Artist/Creator
2. The Explorer
3. The Storyteller
4. The Competitor
5. The Joker
6. The Collector
7. The Kinesthete
8. The Director

* Note that the “featured image” for this post has nothing to do with anything. It is a picture of the latest dungeon gear set I got from FFXIV, right before I scheduled this post.