posted on Saturday, June 11, 2005 5:14 PM by admin Rated Good [4 out of 5].

I'm Brian the Explorer.. and so's my wife...

The One True Way(TM) of exploring is being contested over at Terranova, in more than one discussion.  Some feel it is wandering maps.  Some feel it is discovering game mechanics.  The latter group then become schismatic about whether this still counts if you actually intend to make use of this knowledge, or if that makes you an achiever.

How dumb.  There is no such thing as a "pure" explorer.  The other tendencies in our make-up will dictate what we use our information for.

Without wishing to come over all John Finnis (well, just about any neo-platonist you care to name, in fact), there are bound to be central and peripheral cases of the "Explorer" type.  But the peripheral cases are still Explorers.

I enjoy wandering around virtual worlds.  To be frank, I even get annoyed when the world design puts arbitrary blocks in the way of my exploration: I like to find things, and feel no desire to have to solve puzzles to do so, whereas another Explorer might enjoy discovering how to defeat such blocks.  I like places to be dangerous, but I like having the knowledge to be fairly safe there.  I am less worked up about having a character who is safe there because nothing can challenge his uber l33tness.

But yes, I like to be able to advance more rapidly due to my knowledge.  Does this make me an achiever?  Of course not.  It makes me an Explorer with a bit of Achiever in me too.  I also like to be able to help others who haven't the patience or player knowledge to find out the same things about the world that I can.  But that only means that I have some socialising tendencies, not that I am driven to stand in a cantina all day chatting with fat soccer moms presenting as Twileks.

Incidentally, this is one reason i am not hugely looking forward to D&D Online, despite decades of P&P gaming: red line travel from town to dungeon means no arduous trek cross-country; no wilderness to be explored; no knacks to avoid dangerous foes in the wild.  Middle Earth Online, however, looks more "worldy". 

If you want a world, you're probably an Explorer at heart.  If you want a game, then you're at most going to be a Hacker (as Bartle points out in the comments, he expanded the archetypes to 8 in Designing Virtual Worlds, which I am apparently surprisingly rare in owning, let alone having read): driven by finding ways to find in-game tricks and to work out the underlying structures of the world-system, but immune to the charms of, say, SWG's huge, but mostly-harmless gameworlds.

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